
BooluSiaSA^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



AN ATTIC DREAMER 



BY MICHAEL MONAHAN 

AN ATTIC DREAMER 

AT THE SIGN OF THE VAN 

ADVENTURES IN LIFE AND LETTERS 

NEW ADVENTURES 

HEENRICH HEINE 

NOVA HIBERNLA 



AN ATTIC 
DREAMER 



BY 

MICHAEL MONAHAN 



NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

MGMXXn 



COPYRIGHT, 1922 BY 
MITCHELL KENNERLEY 






PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 



JAN 23 '23 

C1A698111 



TO 

FmLET PETER DUHHE 

WITH MEMORIES OF THE GREAT AGE 

THAT CAME LAUGHIHG AKMdH'ARM 

WITH MR. DOOLET 



THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY 

THIS book is, in great part, the literary 
residuum of a small literary periodi- 
cal. The Papyrus, personally conducted 
by the Author — or more truly, conducting and 
possessing the Author — from 1903 to 19 12. 

The same was not a strictly continuous per- 
formance. There were several suspensions and 
intermissions of varying length, which endear 
the broken sets of The Papyrus to the collector 
of literary curios. 

I published the magazine at my own cost, 
which made it doubly dear to me, and I paid 
full price every way for my free lance and saucy 
independence. But it was an inspiration of 
youth and the courage that goes therewith, and 
I am glad now that I acted upon it. It is true 
there were times when I wanted to quit it once 
and forever, but no sooner had I sent out the 
funeral notices, etc., than I was seized with a 
frantic desire to dig it up again. And so it 
went on and on. For I could not otherwise 
have got the thing out of me that cried for ex- 



viil THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY 

pression, and if I had there would have been 
obstacles to the immediate publishing thereof 
which need not be dwelt upon. I therefore de- 
termined, like the excellent Mr. Howells, to be 
an editor myself: — a position which is of ad- 
vantage to the most gifted, in the way of accost- 
ing the fickle Goddess Fame, if not actually se- 
curing her favors. 

I venture to say that no literary periodical 
ever lived so long that had such a continuously 
hard time of it (being altogether without capi- 
tal), or was so chronically insolvent, or, on 
the other hand, that so entirely paid for itself, 
in the view of its Conductor^ — I should rather 
say, its humble slave and worm of the dust! 
The mere writing of it, as I remember, the 
printing and the sending forth of it each month 
(or sometimes skip one) healed the suicidal 
recurring hunt for the printer's money. 

I know one thing: print will never again look 
so good to me as it did when I mailed the early 
numbers of The Papyrus to a remarkably select 
but rather diminutive list of readers, and then 
waited nervously for the world's intellectual re- 
action. I achieved the miracle of editing and 
publishing and financing it for the space of 
nine years (including suspensions and lay-offs 



THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY ix 

for one reason or another), but I am not rich 
enough to own a Complete Set of it, as pub- 
lished : — some things must be left to the purse- 
proud Collector! 

It will be seen from the foregoing that my 
book has complied with the Horatian condi- 
tion — Nonum prematur in annum — since it has 
been pressed (if not actually suppressed) more 
years than nine. I dare say that, like many a 
greater work, it is none the worse for having so 
long waited its turn. Time is the best editor 
that the world has yet discovered. I may add 
that nothing is here reprinted from The Papy- 
rus save what has stood the test of enduring 
affection and interest on the part of many 
readers. 

I shall not deprive the acute reader of the 
legitimate pleasure of running down divers in- 
consistencies throughout the following pages. 
It is allowed that where inconsistency does not 
prove a weakness of the logical faculty, it may 
be a sign of mental or spiritual growth. I will 
leave it to the aforesaid acute reader to decide 
the point for or against me, merely bespeaking 
a charity equal to his intelligence. In spite of 
a few papers which have stood long in type, he 



X THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY 

will readily divine that I care very little for 
polemics, but very much for Liberty and Litera- 
ture. My point of sympathy with so bold an 
iconoclast as IngersoU, waiving his eloquence 
and literary appeal, was and is in his efforts to 
soften and humanize the religious or, prefer- 
ably, the dogmatic spirit. That there is room 
for such a service, who will seriously question? 
We are still very far from realizing the King- 
dom of Love which the Nazarene came to es- 
tablish amongst us. 

Without presuming to supply a first aid to 
critics, I may perhaps be allowed to point out 
that my book is an adventure of the Romantic 
spirit, both as regards the literary studies and 
the sketches of life herein attempted. And this 
prompts a further observation, to wit, that the 
mingling of such different subject matter, — 
which yet, I hope, does not preclude a due har- 
mony of the whole,— is something of a novelty 
and an experiment in this country. It is not 
without precedent abroad, and may indeed 
claim, among others, the illustrious warrant of 
Anatole France. 

It has been remarked that nothing is so in- 
destructible as a good book; and when I re- 
member how we struggled monthly with that 



THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY xi 

vexatious little Papyrus, walking the floor o' 
nights with it and sparing no pains to prolong 
its uncertain existence — when I remember this 
and see how it rises again more glorious in 
the present incarnation, I wonder if mayhap the 
child shows any stigmata of the life enduring? 
But that is for the wise and candid reader to 
say. , 

Michael Monahan 
New York 

August, 1922 



I 


In the Attic 


17 


II 


The Poe Legend 


22 


III 


In Re Colonel Ingersoll 


57 


IV 


Richard Wagner's Ro- 






mance 


90 


V 


In the Red Room 


104 


VI 


Saint Mark 


115 


VII 


The Poet's Atonement 


127 


VIII 


Children of the Age 


135 


IX 


The Black Friar 


144 


X 


Lafcadio Hearn 


152 


XI 


The Defence of Damien 


172 


XII 


A Port of Age 


181 


XIII 


The Kings 


197 


XIV 


Louis the Grand 


206 


XV 


Dining with Schopen- 






hauer 


214 


XVI 


On Letters 


226 


XVII 


The Song that is Solomon's 


235 



XIV 



AN ATTIC DREAMER 



XVIII 


In Praise of Life 


240 


XIX 


The Forbidden Way 


248 


XX 


Gloria Mundi 


254 


XXI 


The Spring 


258 


XXII 


The First Love 


263 


XXIII 


Seeing the Old Town 


270 


XXIV 


PuLvis ET Umbra 


278 


XXV 


Shadows 


287 


XXVI 


The Great Redemption 


293 


XXVII 


SURSUM CORDA 


298 


XXVIII 


Hope 


302 


XXIX 


Ideal 


30s 


XXX 


Little Mother 


308 


XXXI 


Love 


311 


XXXII 


Epigrams and Aphorisms 


317 


XXXIII 


Scrip for Your Pilgrim- 






age 


324 


XXXIV 


Song of the Rain 
L'Envoi 


330 
332 



AN ATTIC DREAMER 



IN THE ATTIC 

[By Way of Prologue^ 

IN old days, In merrie England, the chap- 
man or pamphleteer set up shop in an attic, 
as much for economy's sake as to be out of 
easy reach of the police. Commonly he bit the 
thumb at Government, and the bilks were his 
natural foes. Great men out of place lent him 
secret support and countenance, paying the 
costs of his perilous trade and supplying him 
with matter for his broadsides. His fidelity to 
his patrons was his best virtue ; in other respects 
of conduct he was, it is to be feared, no better 
than he should have been. But the life was one 
of constant adventure, and as such appealed to 
many daring spirits. Often they had to move, 
and quickly, too, yet they were not always quick 
enough for the emissaries of Government. To 
stand in the pillory and there submit to the 
nameless outrages of the London mob ; to spend 
long years in jails fouler than a modern sewer; 

17 



1 8 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

to be whipped and branded by the sovereign 
majesty of the law; to be hunted from one rook- 
ery to another — such was the lot of many a 
bold pamphleteer of the Seventeenth and Eigh- 
teenth centuries. 

Ah well, my lads, they had a stirring time of 
it, for all their hard lines, and potently, though 
obscurely, they made themselves felt on public 
opinion, which, as hath been said, is but history 
in the making. Peace to them ! — they and their 
types, their plotting and pamphleteering, their 
ballads and broadsides, have long since vanished 
from the scene; but some echo of their ancient 
hardihood, some smack of real service to the 
good old cause of liberty, which to render they 
so bravely risked life and limb, — still linger in 
the world. 

I therefore feel that in publishing The Papy- 
rus from an attic I am in accord with some 
worthy literary traditions. To be sure, it's a 
very nice attic and roomy enough — well 
lighted, too, with walls and ceiling finished off 
and calcimined. Strictly speaking. The Papyrus 
occupies only half the attic; the other half, 
which by a lucky chance is quite separate and 
partitioned off, the younger children use for a 
playhouse on rainy days. Oh, and I had al- 



IN THE ATTIC 19 

most forgotten, the family linen is sometimes 
dried here, with great convenience. 

Allah is both wise and good. He sometimes 
puts it into the stony heart of a landlord (Jer- 
sey landlord at that) to make unwitting pro- 
vision for the Children of the Dream. 

The stairway leading to both attics is quite 
dark, and it turns sharply, but we don't feel 
that to be a great objection, as the Youngest is 
now walking and only swarms when he is going 
down stairs — which he does backward and with 
remarkable celerity. 

Once a month the children have great fun 
carrying the little brown booklets from the low- 
er floor, where the printer delivers them, to the 
attic; and again from the attic to the lower 
floor, when ready to be mailed. That is, they 
think it's great fun — and surely a large family 
is not without its compensations. 

The Papyrus, by the way, is just the age of 
our Youngest but One, a ^ve-year-old girl. I 
am not sure of which I am the fonder, but the 
Mother, with a touch of artistic jealousy, says 
she is . . . 

I love this little attic room. Here I spend 
the only quiet hours that I may really call mine. 



20 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Here, with the world and its taskmasters shut 
out, I cheat myself with a dream of indepen- 
dence — ah, an uneasy dream at best, and a fleet- 
ing one, but yet it links day unto day with a 
thread of gold. The good thoughts that come 
only with silence — peace without and within — 
have here their dwelling place. Here, too, I 
listen oft to a Voice which speaks of the sure, 
though late, reward that waits on unyielding 
effort, on hope that springs anew from each de- 
feat, on faith in self that can stand against the 
world, on fidelity to the Dream! 

Yes, even though knowing myself unworthy 
of the high call it would lay upon me, I do 
hearken to that Voice — aye, and often sigh that 
I may not rise to those heights of heroism to 
which it points me. 

O little attic room, that has shared the secret 
of my dearest cherished hopes, that has known 
and ever knows something not all unworthy in 
me which to express is at once my joy and my 
despair, — who shall sit here in days to come 
when I am gone? Pray God it be one who may 
think not unkindly of him that dreamed his 
dreams here for a space, and was, in his fash- 
ion, happy within your quiet walls. . . . 

More commonly, however, I think of my 



IN THE ATTIC 21 

literary predecessors, the old English chapmen 
and pamphleteers in their attics, and how the 
wind of time has long since blown them and 
their works away. 

And I smile to myself, once more put off 
beginning my Masterpiece . . . well, till to- 
morrow; turn down the light, and go softly to 
bed. I 



II 

THE POE LEGEND 

\_An Unconventional Version'] 

A COMPLIMENT which mediocrity 
often pays to genius, is to indict it. 
So there Is an indictment against 
Edgar Allan Poe, with a bill of particulars, the 
effect of which is to make him out the chief 
Horrible Example of our literary history. 

Most of his critics admit that he was a 
genius and deny that he was a respectable per- 
son. 

A considerable number deny his respectability 
with warmth, and coldly concede to him a cer- 
tain measure of poetical talent. 

A few embittered ones deny that he was 
either respectable or a genius. 

No one has ever contended for him that he 
was both a genius and respectable. I do not 
make this claim, as I should not wish to appear 
too original; and, besides, I am content with 



THE POE LEGEND 23 

the fact of his genius, and care nothing for 
the question of respectability. Or, yes, I do 
care something for it, if by respectability is 
meant that prudent regard for self which would 
have prevented the suicide of Poe. I'm sure 
if he were living to-day, he would never think 
of drinking himself to death. His work would 
be better paid, for one thing, — supposing that 
he could get past the magazine editors, — and 
then we have learned a little how to drink — the 
art was crude and brutal in Poe's day. Per- 
haps this is the only respect in which we, the 
children of a later generation, are better artists 
than he. 

It is true that some eminent living poets are 
quite successful in keeping sober, and they are 
even more successful in writing poetry which is 
not so good as Poe's I 

In brief, conventionality bids fair to kill off 
the poet and place him at no distant date in the 
category of extinct species. 

True poetry is something awful, mysterious, 
as beautiful and terrible as the lightning's leap 
in the coUied heaven, charming the eye with 
dread and rousing the soul to a quick sense of 
the Power behind the mechanism of nature! 
Now it is difficult to associate this idea with a 



24 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

type of poet that offers no food for wonder and 
leaves us no ground for illusions. 

No doubt many a respectable poet would 
pitch the proprieties to Hell, if he could be sure 
that by so doing he would land beside Villon 
and Burns and Byron and Poe. But that is a 
large "if", and in our day it is almost as hard 
to live the old life of the poet as to recapture 
his careless lyric rapture and the secret of his 
wild genius. 

Indeed, if we may believe the Philistines of 
the hour, the personality of the poet is no 
longer much in question; seeing that he is re- 
duced or, if you please, elevated to a perfectly 
respectable type; offers no shocking singulari- 
ties of character or conduct; is often arrayed as 
the lilies and bidden to discourse platitudes be- 
fore young ladies' seminaries; and has modest 
hopes of being one day decorated as a Doctor 
Litterarum. 

But look you, there are some amongst us who 
will fight until their eyelids can no longer wag, 
against this caricature of the Poet. Human 
nature, too, is opposed to it, and the heresy is 
not written in the Holy Book of Genius. I do 
not contend that literature must be a species 



THE POE LEGEND 25 

of Newgate Calendar,* a history of tragedies, 
errors and defeats : — that were to overdarken 
the picture. But I shall venture to hold suspect 
the man who comes smiling and sleek and pros- 
perous before me, in the awful name of Poet; 
with no signs upon him of agony and wrestling, 
and no visible wounds from the embraces of 
his God. 

II 

THE tradition of Poe's drunkenness, or to 
speak scientifically, dipsomania, hangs on 
so persistently that many people can think of 
him only in connection with that still unforgot- 
ten melodrama, "Ten Nights in a Barroom". 
As a boy I used to fancy that he was cut out 
for the leading part in it. And in fact I saw 
a play not long ago — in the provinces, of 
course — in which the author of "The Raven" 
was shown drunk in every act and working up 
to a brilliant chmax of the "horrors". . . . 

When I try to summon before my mind's eye 
the figure of Poe, the man in his habit as he 
lived, his daily walks and associates, the picture 
is at once broken up by an irruption of red and 

* This was Carlyle's notion and phrase. 



26 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

angry faces — old John Allan, Burton the 
Comedian (who could be so tragically in ear- 
nest, and so damned virtuous with a poor poet) , 
White, Griswold, Wilmer, Graham, Briggs, the 
sweet singer of "Ben Bolt", and others of the 
queer literati of that day. Each and all declare 
in staccato, with positive forefinger raised, 
''We tell you the man was drunk!" Then Absa- 
lom Willis appears, bowing daintily, and says in 
mild deprecation, "No, I would not precisely 
say drunk — but do me the honor to read my 
article on the subject in the 'Home Journal'." 
The saintly Longfellow, evoked from the 
shades, seems to add, "Not merely drunk, but 
malignant". And a host of forgotten poet- 
asters looming dimly in the background, take 
up the Psalmist's words and make a refrain of 
them — "Not merely drunk, but malignant!" 

Since this is what we get, in lieu of biog- 
raphy, by those who have taken the life of Poe, 
it is no wonder that the obscure dramatist 
seizes on the same stuff for his purpose, de- 
grading the most famous of our poets to the 
level of a barroom hero. Whether or not it is 
possible at this late day to separate the fame 
of Poe from the foul legend of drunkenness 
and sodden dissipation that has gathered about 



THE POE LEGEND 27 

it, I would not venture to say; but very sure am 
I that no one has yet attempted the feat. Even 
the mild and half-apologetic Dr. Woodberry is 
gravely interested in the number, extent and 
variety of Poe's drunks. Let me not forget one 
honorable exception, Edmund Clarence Sted- 
man, who has taken his brother poet, "as he 
was and for what he was". I do not, how- 
ever, include Mr. Stedman with the biogra- 
phers of Poe — he stands rather at the head 
of those who have sought to interpret his genius 
and to safeguard his literary legacy. And 
though (I think) he brought no great love to 
the task — Poe is hardly a subject to inspire love 
— he has done it fairly and well, 

I may here observe, parenthetically, that in a 
very kind letter addressed to the author, Mr. 
Stedman demurs at the suggestion that he 
brought no great love to his critical labors in 
behalf of Poe — labors that have unquestionably 
raised the poet's literary status in the view of 
many, and have as certainly cleared away a 
mass of prejudice, evil report and misunder- 
standing attached to his personal character and 
reputation. But all I mean to convey is, that 
Mr. Stedman's splendid work was done, as it 
appears to me, less for the love of Poe than 



28 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

for the love of letters. In saying this I imply 
not the slightest reproach : Poe is a man to be 
pitied, praised, admired, regretted; or, if you 
please, to be hated, envied, blamed, and con- 
demned. But love — such love, say, as Lamb 
inspired in his friends and still inspires in his 
readers — is not for the lonely singer of 
"Israfel". 

I agree with Poe's biographers that he got 
drunk often, but I am only sorry that he never 
got any fun out of it — the man was essentially 
unhumorous. I should be glad to hold a brief 
for Poe's drunkenness, If his tippling ever yield- 
ed him any solace; or, better still, if it ever 
inspired him to any genuine literary effort. We 
know well that some great poets have success- 
fully wooed the Muse in their cups, but you can 
take my word for it, they were cold sober when 
they worked the thing out. It is true Emerson 
says (after Milton) that the poet who is to see 
visions of the gods should drink only water 
out of a wooden bowl; but Emerson belonged 
to the unjoyous race of New England Brah- 
mins, who were surprisingly like the snow-men 
children make, in that they lacked natural heat 
and rude passions. We may not forget that a 
poet who stands for all time as an ideal type of 



THE POE LEGEND 29 

sanity and genius — the always contemporary 
Quintus Horatius Flaccus — has in many places 
guaranteed mediocrity to the abstaining bard.* 
So there was the best poetical warrant for 
Poe's drinking, if he could only have got any 
good out of it. But he couldn't and didn't; he 
was merely, at times frequent enough to jus- 
tify his enemies, an ordinary dipsomaniac, crav- 
ing the madness of alcohol; mirthless, darkly 
sullen, quite insane, though perhaps physically 
harmless; hardly conscious of his own identity. 
Of the genial god Bacchus, who rewards his 
true devotees with jollity and mirth, with for- 
getfulness of care and the golden promise of 
fortune, who makes poets of dull men and gods 
of poets — of this splendid and beneficent deity, 
Poe knew nothing. That spell from which 
Horace drew his most charming visions ; which 
inspired Burns with courage to sing amid the 
hopeless poverty of his lot; which kindled the 
genius of Byron and allured the fancy of Heine, 
like his own Lorelei; which is three-fourths of 
Beranger and one-half of Moore — to Poe 

*I need only cite the famous lines — 

— nee vivere carmina possunt 

Qua scribuntur aqua potoribus. 
Which may be rudely Englished — 

O water-drinking bards, how brief the date 

Your laurels flourish, tho' so "dry" your state! 



30 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

meant only madness, the sordid kind from 
which men turn away with horror and disgust, 
and which too often leads to the clinic and the 
potter's field. The kindly spirit of wine, that 
for a brief time at least works an inspiring 
change in every man, enlarging the sympathies, 
softening the heart, prompting new and gen- 
erous impulses, opening the soul shut up to self 
to the greater claims and interests of humanity, 
was, in the case of Poe, turned into a malefic 
genie, intent only upon the lowest forms of 
animal gratification, and reckless of any and 
every ill wrought to body and soul. 

In other words — for I must not write a con- 
ventional essay — Poe was the kind of man that 
never should have touched the cup. For there 
are some men — oh, yes, I know it! — to whom 
the mildest wine ever distilled from grapes 
kissed by the sun in laughing valleys, is deadly 
poison, fatal as that draught brewed of old by 
the Colchian enchantress. And of these was 
poor Edgar Poe. 

Neither were there for him those negative 
but still pleasing virtues which are sometimes 
credited to a worshiper of the great god 
Bacchus — perhaps they are mostly fictitious, but 
this is a fraud at which Virtue herself may con- 



THE POE LEGEND 31 

nive. I am very sure no one ever called Poe 
a "good fellow" for all the whiskey he drank; 
and his biographers also make the same omis- 
sion. The drunkenness of Burns calls up the 
laughing genius of a hundred matchless ballads, 
the dance, the fair, and the hot love that fol- 
lowed close upon ; calls up the epic riot of beg- 
gars in the alehouse of Poosie Nancy — and we 
see the whole vivid life of Burns was of a piece 
with his poetry. To wish him less drunken or 
more sober (if you prefer it) is to wish him 
less a poet. 

Not so with Poe, as I have already shown. 
He got nothing from drink, in the way of lit- 
erary inspiration, though some of his critics 
think he did, and, being themselves both sober 
and dull, appear to doubt whether anything so 
gotten is legitimate. I hate to lay irreverent 
hands on the popular belief that "The Raven" 
was composed during or just following a crisis 
of drunken delirium — the poem is too elab- 
orately artificial for that, — and has not Poe 
told us how he wrote it, in a confession which, 
more clearly than all the labored disparage- 
ment of his biographers, explains the vanity, 
the weakness and the fatal lack of humor in his 
make-up? I do not find any suggestions of 



32 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

drink or "dope" in the samples of his prose 
which I dislike, such as a few of his "Old 
World Romances". If there be any "dope" 
in this stuff, it is, in my opinion, the natural 
dope of faculties when driven against their 
will to attempt things beyond the writer's prov- 
ince or power. And there is also the "dope" of 
what could be, at times, a fearfully bad style. 
But I am not writing a literary essay. 

I conclude, then, that in the case of Edgar 
Allan Poe, drink has no extenuating circum- 
stances, though many might be pleaded for the 
poet himself. It made enemies for him of 
those who wanted to be his friends (if you will 
only believe them) ; it lost him his money — 
deuced little of it ever he had; it helped to 
break his health, and it gave him no valuable 
literary inspiration. Some solace, I would 
gladly think, it yielded him, and mayhap (who 
knows?) there was a blessed nepenthe in the 
peace it brought him at last when, after bab- 
bling a while on his cot in that Baltimore hos- 
pital, there came to him the only dreamless 
sleep he ever knew. 



THE POE LEGEND 33 

III 

ALL his life long Poe dreamed of having a 
magazine of his own, and never got his 
desire. He was always writing to his friends 
and possible patrons about this one darling 
dream; but nothing came of it. The nearest 
he ever got to his wish was when he succeeded 
in drawing into his plan one T. C. Clarke, a 
Philadelphia publisher. Clarke had money, 
and he put up a certain amount toward the 
starting of the "Penn", as the magazine was to 
be called. Some initial steps were taken, and 
the moment seems to have been the most san- 
guine in Poe's long battle with adversity. He 
was full of enthusiasm and wrote to many 
friends, detailing his literary hopes and projects 
in connection with the new magazine. Then 
suddenly, and rather unaccountably, everything 
was dropped. It seems likely that Clarke took 
cold in his money — at any rate, the "Penn" 
died a-borning. Poe had gone far enough to 
incur a large-sized debt to Clarke: — he left in 
the latter's hand a manuscript as security, 
which, we may suppose, did not raise the tem- 
perature of that gentleman's finances. 

Then the planning and the letter-writing and 



34 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

the making of prospectuses, with other archi- 
tectural projects of the Spanish variety, went 
on and continued to the end of the chapter — 
good God ! how pathetic and yet how grimly 
humorous it all is to one who has carried the 
same cross, and knows every inch of that Cal- 
vary! Poe was at least spared the struggle 
which comes after possession; but I am aware 
that this is no consolation to the man who is 
dying to make his fight. 

Yet once again the chance fluttered into his 
hands, when he bought the "Broadway Jour- 
nal" from a man named Bisco with a note of 
fifty dollars endorsed by Horace Greeley. Not 
long afterward Horace had the pleasure of 
paying the note, and he remained to the end 
a strong believer in Poe's imaginative gifts. 
About the same time that the philosopher part- 
ed with his money, Poe gave up his brief pos- 
session of the "Journal". But still he went on 
in the old hopeless, hopeful way, dreaming of 
that blessed magazine, which he had now de- 
cided to call the "Stylus" instead of the 
"Penn". And a name only it remained to the 
last. 

From these and many similar facts in the life 
of Poe his biographers to a man conclude that 



THE POE LEGEND 35 

he had no business ability. I am not so sure — I 
am only sure that he never had the money. 
In fact, Poe was never able to raise more than 
one hundred dollars at any one time in his whole 
life — once when he borrowed that sum to get 
married (and the sneerers say, forgot to repay 
it), and again when he won a like amount with 
a prize story. Yes, he got a judgment of 
something over two hundred dollars against his 
savage foe, Thomas Dunn English,* but I am 
not aware that it was ever satisfied — think of 
Poe suing a man for literary libel I His usual 
salary was ten dollars a week — Burton, the 
tragic Comedian, held out a promise of more, 
but discharged him when the time to make good 
came around — and this after Poe had gained 
what was considered a literary reputation in 
those days. With such resources, to have start- 
ed the kind of magazine Poe had always in 
mind, would have tasked a man of great busi- 
ness ability, with no poetical ideas floating 
about in his head to divert him from the Main 
Chance. 

Certainly Poe was not the man for the job — 

•A mediocre and prolific poet of whose works scarcely 
anything is now remembered or reprinted, save the once 
popular ballad, "Ben Bolt", which owes its later recrudes- 
cence to "Trilby". 



36 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

I doubt if he could have sold shares in El Do- 
rado. But I do not think his failures, such as 
they were, justly convict him of a complete lack 
of that ordinary sense which enables a man to 
carry his money as far as the corner. There 
is a popular cant now, based on the success of 
some fortunate writers, that literary genius of 
high order is not inconsistent with first-rate 
business ability. I do not care to go into the 
discussion — especially as this is not a literary 
essay — but I will say that in most instances 
cited to prove the point, the money sense is a 
good deal more obvious than the literary 
genius. 

To make what is called a business success in 
this world, a man is required to do homage 
unto many gods. But though he pay the most 
devoted worship to the divinities of Thrift, 
Enterprise, Courage, Energy, Foresight, Cal- 
culation, he will still fail should he omit his 
tribute to a greater god than these — Expedi- 
ency ! 

In his poetical way Edgar Allan Poe went 
a-questing after many strange worships, and he 
was learned in all that mystic lore as far back 
as the Chaldeans. But he seems never to have 
got an inkling of that one Universal Religion 



THE POE LEGEND 37 

in which all men believe, which settles all 
earthly things — the inexorable Divinity of 
Affairs, already named, by which success or 
failure is determined for every man that 
cometh into the world. 

IV 

TOWARD the close of Poe's life a horde 
of female poets rushed upon his trail. 
His relations with them were not wholly "free 
from blame", to quote his biographers — they 
seem to have been, at any rate, Platonic. In- 
deed, the fact is self-evident. A poetess who 
is always studying her own emotions for "copy", 
is not to be taken unawares. I think Poe was 
in more danger of being led astray than any 
of the ladies whom he distinguished with his 
attentions. It is to be noted that they invari- 
ably speak of him as a "perfect gentleman", 
even after he has ceased to honor them with 
his affections. To me there is something rather 
literary than womanly in such angelic charity 
and forgiveness — 'tis too sugary sweet. Have 
we not heard that lovers estranged make the 
bitterest enemies? At any rate, the lover of 
"Ligeia", "Eleonora" and similar abstractions 



38 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

was not a man to be feared by a poetess of well- 
seasoned virtue. 

Yes, I am sure they only wanted to get copy 
out of him, and especially to link their names 
with his. They were mostly widows, too — 
which makes the thing even more suspicious. 
One of them — that one to whom he addressed 
his finest lyric — was forty-five. Lord, Lord! 
what liars these poets are ! I give you my word 
that until very lately, I believed those perfect 
lines "To Helen" idealized some youthful love 
of Poe's. 

Ah! Psyche, from the regions which 
Are holy land. 

Psyche lived in Providence, which is in the 
State of Rhode Island. She was, as I have 
said, forty-five, an age that should be above 
tempting or temptation. She wrote verses, now 
forgotten, and her passion for Poe was of the 
most literary character. After a two-days' 
courtship he proposed to her and was accepted, 
on condition, however, that he amend his breath 
— which is to say, his habits. Poe seems to 
have regretted his rashness, for he at once 
started on a bat (these remarks are not liter- 
ary), as if the prospect of his joy were too 



THE POE LEGEND 39 

much for him. Still Helen would not reject 
him; she merely wrote him more poetry — and 
the poet again turned to drink as if to drown 
a great sorrow. A day was set for the wed- 
ding, and he began celebrating at the hotel bar 
long before the hour appointed for the cere- 
mony. Helen heard of his early start, and, 
knowing what he could do in a long day with 
such an advantage, she sent for him and broke 
off the engagement. This is the only instance 
I know of in Poe's entire career where his 
drinking had the least appearance of sanity. 

Before this, and indeed during the lifetime 
of Mrs. Poe, he had broken with Mrs. Ellet, a 
lady who made feeble verse, but whose ability 
for scandal and mischief was out of the ordi- 
nary. It was through this daughter of the 
Muses that the poet became estranged from 
Mrs. Osgood, and there was a beautiful wom- 
en's row, in which Margaret Fuller took a 
hand. Mrs. Osgood was a gushing person, 
ferociously intent on "copy", but of mature age 
and quite capable of taking care of herself. 
She declares and asseverates that Poe chased 
her to Providence — that fatal Providence I — 
likewise to Albany, imploring her to love him. 
I wonder where he got the money for these 



40 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

journeys — about this time he was lecturing on 
the "Cosmogony of the Universe", in order to 
raise funds for his eternally projected maga- 
zine. The very popular nature of the subject 
and his own qualities as a lyceum entertainer, — 
which never would have commended him to the 
late Major Pond — incline me to the belief that 
Poe was not at that time burning much money 
in trips to Providence and Albany. 

At any rate, Mrs. Osgood cut him out, 
though on her deathbed, with a last effort of 
the ruling passion (or literary motive) she very 
handsomely forgave him and pronounced a 
touching eulogy on his moral character. 

Then there was "Annie", a married woman 
living near Boston, to whom Poe addressed a 
sincere and beautiful poem. The exigencies of 
her case rather strain the Platonic theory, but 
I do not give up my brief, mind you. I suspect 
that Annie was behind the breaking off with 
Helen; but, of course, he couldn't marry Annie 
for the reason that she had a husband already 
(of whom we know no more), and divorces 
were not then negotiated in record time. Annie 
was therefore obliged to be content with the 
sweet satisfaction of foiling a hated rival — and 
to a woman's heart, we know this is the next 



THE POE LEGEND 41 

best thing to landing the man. Annie, by the 
way, was not a literary person ; she wanted love 
from Poe, not copy; and she seems to have sin- 
cerely, if not very sensibly, loved the poet for 
himself. 

Remains the last of these queer attachments 
which throw a kind of grotesque romance over 
the closing years of Poe. Mrs. Shelton was of 
unimpeached maturity, like the rest, and like 
all the rest but one, a widow. She lived in Rich- 
mond, Virginia, and she had been a boyish 
flame of Poe's. Mrs. Shelton was neither beau- 
tiful nor literary, and she had attained the ripe 
age of fifty years. But she was rich, and 
though Poe was not a business man, I dare say 
he felt the money would be no great inconveni- 
ence — and then there was always the magazine 
to be started, dear me! Still he made love to 
her as if half afraid she would take him at his 
word — and he kept writing to Annie ! But 
Mrs. Shelton was of sterner stuff than the poetic 
Helen. She had made up her mind to marry 
Poe for reasons sufficient unto herself, and she 
would have done it had not fate intervened. 
She made her preparations like a thorough 
business woman, and strong-mindedly led the 
way toward the altar. The wedding ring was 



42 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

bought (I can hardly believe with Poe's 
money), and all things were in readiness for 
the happy event, when the poet wandered away 
on that luckless journey whose end was in an- 
other world. 

Mrs. Shelton wore mourning for him, and all 
her women friends told her it was wonderfully 
becoming. ... I think Annie's crape was 
at the heart. 

Edgar Allan Poe was a child in the hands of 
women, and that's the whole truth — a loving, 
weak, vain and irresponsible child. This count 
in the indictment is the weakest of all. I should 
not have referred to it were this a conventional 
"study" of the Poet. 



THE notion that Poe was mad has within 
late years received a quasi-scientific con- 
firmation — at least the doctors have settled the 
matter to their own satisfaction. I therefore 
advert to it in order to dispose of the Poe in- 
dictment in full. 

My learned friend, Dr. William Lee How- 
ard, of Baltimore (a town forever memorable 
to the lovers of the poet) , sets out to prove that 
Edgar Allan Poe was not a drunkard in the 



THE POE LEGEND 43 

ordinary sense (which is ordinarily believed), 
but was rather what the medical experts are 
now calling a psychopath; in plain words, a 
madman. "He belongs," says the doctor, "to 
that class of psychopaths too long blamed and 
accused of vicious habits that are really symp- 
toms of disease — a disease now recognized by 
neurologists as psychic epilepsy." The doctor 
fortifies his thesis with much learning of the 
same portentous kind, and in conclusion he 
says: 

"The psychologist readily understands the 
reason for Poe's intensity, for his cosmic terror 
and his constant dwelling upon the aspects of 
physical decay. He lived alternately a life of 
obsession and lucidity, and this duahty is the 
explanation of his being so shamefully mis- 
understood — so highly praised, so cruelly 
blamed. In most of his weird and fantastic 
tales we can see the patient emerging from ob- 
livion. We find in his case many of the pri- 
mary symptoms of the psychopath — a dis- 
ordered and disturbed comprehension of con- 
cepts, suspicion, and exaggerated ideas of per- 
secution." 

These be words horrendous and mouth-fill- 
ing, but surely I need not remind the erudite 
Dr. Howard that — 



44 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

When Bishop Berkeley said there was no 

matter, 
And proved it — 'twas no matter what he 

said. 

And I suspect Dr. Howard in coming, as 
he thinks, to the defence of Poe's reputation, 
has done the poet an ill service, though 1 
doubt if he will influence any right-judging 
minds. Nor am I in sympathy with the 
doctor's ingenious argument that the most 
strongly marked products of Poe's genius are 
to be referred to a diseased mental and nervous 
condition; which is simply Nordau's conten- 
tion that all genius is disease. According to 
this view, all men of great intellectual power 
— e. g., Nordau himself and Dr. William Lee 
Howard — are insane; and yet it is a fact that 
the madhouses are chiefly peopled with the 
average sort of human beings. 

No, the first of American poets was not mad 
because he wrote "The Raven", and "The 
House of Usher", and "Ligeia", and "The Red 
Death". These masterpieces indeed prove that 
he was at certain fortunate times in possession 
of that highest and most potential sanity, that 
mens divinior, from which true artistic creation 



THE POE LEGEND 45 

results — always the rarest and most beautiful 
phenomenon in the world. 

Mad? I guess notl but no doubt he was 
thought to be cracked by the half of his ac- 
quaintance, for such is the tribute that medioc- 
rity ever pays to genius. The small grocer folk 
and their kind about Fordham, as well as 
some more pretentious respectabilities, looked 
askance at the poor poet struggling with his 
burden and his vision; fighting his unequal bat- 
tle with fate and fortune. In much the same 
way, with a scarcely veiled contempt and aver- 
sion, he was regarded by the successful literary 
cliques of the day, especially the "New England 
School" of his detestation — to which it must 
be allowed he offered provocation enough by 
his critical disparagements.* It is to be noted 
that Mr. W. D. Howells, the leading inheritor 
of their tradition, though a critic of unusual 
breadth and sympathy, has a poor notion of 
Poe. In short, our poet was that scandal and 
contradiction in his own day — a true genius; 
and he remains an enigma to ours. 

But I do not think he was any more a psycho- 
path or a madman than — bless me I — Dr. Wil- 
liam Lee Howard himself — though I will grant 

♦Emerson called him the "jingle man". 



46 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

that, as we are now saying, several things got 
constantly on his nerves. And among these : 

Chronic poverty. 
Rejection of his literary claims. 
Success of his inferiors. 
The insolence of publishers. 
Humiliation of spirit. 

And — I must grant it — the agony induced 
by his occasional excesses and his forfeiture of 
self-respect. 

I do not argue that the misfortunes prove the 
genius, even though in Poe's case they seem to 
have been the penalty annexed to his extraordi- 
nary gifts — the curse of the malignant Fairy. 
But with due respect to the learned authority 
several times referred to, and in spite of all 
the Bedlam science in the world, I hold to my 
faith that true genius is not the negation, but 
the affirmation of sanity. 

As for the literary smugs, to whom Poe is 
still anathema because he was a genius and also 
a scandal, according to their moral code : is it 
not enough, gentlemen, that you are prosper- 
ous, and respectable — and utterly unlike Poe? 



THE POE LEGEND 47 

VI 

NEXT to the subject of Pbe's drinking 
habits, which you have to follow like a 
strong breath through every account of him 
that I have seen — his faithful biographers give 
most attention to his borrowings. Hence the 
typical Foe biography reads, as I have already 
suggested, like an indictment. 

Now, the fact is, poor Poe was as bad a bor- 
rower as he was a drinker — he meant well, and 
heaven knows he tried hard enough in each 
capacity, but neither part fitted him, and in 
both he failed to rise to the dignity of the 
artist. He was truly a bum borrower (this is 
not a literary essay). He never executed a 
"touch" with grace or finesse. Instead of going 
to his friends with endearing assurance, smiling 
like a May-day at the honor and pleasure he de- 
signed them, he put on his hat with the deep 
black band and went like an undertaker to con- 
duct his own funeral. No wonder they threw 
him down I But in truth he rarely had the cour- 
age to face his man, and so he sent the poor 
devoted Mrs. Clemm — that paragon of moth- 
ers-in-law for a poet I — or else weakly relied on 
his powers of literary persuasion and courted 



48 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

certain refusal by penning his modest request. 
Call this man a borrower! Why, he was a 
parody of Charles Lamb's idea that your true 
borrower — like Alcibiades or Brinsley Sheri- 
dan — belongs to a superior kind of humanity, 
the Great Race — born to rule the rest. He 
never realized the greatness of the Borrowing 
Profession — never rose to it, to take a meta- 
phor from the stage, but remained a mumping, 
fearful, calamity-inviting, graceless and hope- 
less, make-believe borrower to the last. 

For this his biographers are ashamed of him, 
as for his sprees, and this also has passed into 
the popular legend concerning Poe, of which 
the obscure dramatist (already referred to) 
has availed himself. Neither the unknown 
dramatist nor his biographers have deemed it 
worth while to explain this phase of Poe's life 
— these are the facts and here are the letters 
to Kennedy, Griswold, White, Thomas, Gra- 
ham, Clarke, Simms, Willis, et at. Can you 
make anything else of them? And another 
count of the indictment in re Edgar Allan Poe 
is proven. 

I am not writing a literary essay, but I must 
again lay stress on one thing, in extenuation of 
Poe's inveterate offence of borrowing from his 



THE POE LEGEND 49 

friends — he did it very badly, so badly that this 
fact alone should excuse him in the eyes of the 
charitable. Let us also try to bear in mind 
that the most he could earn, after giving oath- 
bound guarantees as to sobriety, etc., was Ten 
Dollars a week — this was the sum for which 
Burton (the tragic comedian) hired him, and 
from which in a very short time the same Bur- 
ton ruthlessly separated him. The joke being 
that this same fat-headed Burton carried on the 
affair with a high show of regard for the dig- 
nity of the Literary Profession, outraged by 
Poe ! Ten dollars a week I Why, do you know 
that our most popular author, Mr. Success G. 
Smith, is believed to earn about fifty thousand 
a year by his pen? That Mr. Calcium Givem- 
fitts, the fearless exposer of corruption in high 
places, is worrying along on a beggarly stipend 
of, say, thirty-five thousand? That the famous 
society novelist, Mrs. Tuxedo Smith-Jones, 
barely contrives to make ends meet on the same 
hard terms; and that a score of others might 
be named whose incomes do not fall below 
twenty-five thousand? . . . 

But, you say, does each and every one of 
these gifted and fortunate individuals make lit- 
erature in the sense that Poe made it? My 



50 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

dear sir, these persons are all my intimate 
friends; I admire their works next to my own, 
though I confess I do not read them so often. 
Therefore, to single out one of these distin- 
guished and successful authors for praise would 
be invidious ; and, besides — I am not writing a 
literary essay. 



VII 



THAT old, old story of genius struggling 
with want, and overborne by cruel neces- 
sity, hampered too by its weaknesses, how piti- 
ful though trite it is! The other day I went 
into the great Public Library of New York, in 
order to verify some data for this paper. Un- 
der the glass cases displaying rare books and 
autograph letters, I saw one or two exhibits 
which quite made me forget the object of my 
visit. I looked at them a long time, and I 
would like you to understand and share the 
feeling which they evoked in me. 

There was, first of all, a copy of the First 
Edition of Poe's "Murders in the Rue Mor- 
gue" and "The Man That Was Used Up", 
published by Graham of Philadelphia; a thin 
book, or rather pamphlet, in gray covers. An 



THE POE LEGEND 51 

inscription stated that it was a very rare copy, 
only one other of this edition being known to 
exist, and that it had brought at auction in 
1909, the sum of thirty-eight hundred dollars; 
the highest price yet paid for any book printed 
in America. Thirty-eight hundred dollars! — 
an amount that would have seemed a fortune 
to Poe and would have secured to his later 
years the independence of which he vainly 
dreamed to the last — perhaps added to his days 
and enabled him to leave us a richer literary 
legacy. And why was this great sum paid 
recently for a cheap paper-covered book printed 
away back in 1843, seeing that we possess the 
stories in numerous better editions? Why but 
because the rich collector prized and coveted 
that book for its rarity as one of the indubitable 
proofs of Poe's pilgrimage — let me say with- 
out irreverence, a thorn from his crown, a stone 
from his Calvary. Nay, has not the world, in 
various ways, always paid the highest price for 
the relics of the martyr? How else shall we 
surely know the elect ones who suffered and 
travailed in order that their great thoughts 
might be born? 

I turned from this to an autograph letter of 
one of the most famous and unfortunate of 



52 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

poets, whose destiny Is not without tragic like- 
ness to that of Poe. It bore date March 31, 
1788, and read In part as follows: 

"I am so harassed with care and anxiety 
about this farming project of mine that my 
Muse has degenerated Into the veriest prose 
wench that ever picked cinders or followed a 
tinker. ... At present the world sits such 
a load on my mind that It has effaced almost 
every trace of the image of God in me." 

The letter is signed Robert Burns. 

In the same case I saw a letter of Poe's, ad- 
dressed to one E. A. Duyclnck, Esq., and bear- 
ing date November 13, 1845. It ran as fol- 
lows : 

"My dear Mr. Duyclnck: 

I am still dreadfully unwell and fear I shall 
be very seriously ill. I have resolved to give 
up the 'Broadway Journal' and retire to the 
country for six months or perhaps a year, as 
the sole means of regaining my health and 
spirits. Is it not possible that yourself, or Mr. 
Mathews, might give me a trifle for my Inter- 
est in the paper? Or if this cannot be effected, 
might I venture to ask you for an advance of 
$50 on the faith of the American Parnassus, 
which I will finish as soon as possible? If you 
would oblige me In this manner, I would feel 
myself under the deepest obligation." 



THE POE LEGEND 53 

The writer ends by requesting that reply be 
sent by bearer — another proof of Poe's de- 
ficiency in the borrowing craft, since only a 
novice or a bungler would thus attempt to force 
a man's hand. Loans are very shy toward 
those who seem to need them so badly. 

This letter so strangely companioning that 
of Burns, which it resembles in its burden of 
complaint and the cry of despair it voices, is 
stated to be from the Duycinck collection. I 
am inclined to suspect that the requested fifty 
was never added to the Poe collection. 

By the way, there was another letter in the 
case, from a great and famous and successful 
contemporary of Poe, whose ordered and happy 
life was in every respect a contrast to his. I 
wonder why, under the circumstances, it gave 
me no thrill to read those lines penned by the 
hand of Longfellow: — verily unto him that 
hath shall not always be given! 

VIII 

A LAST word as to Poe's enemies — those 
whom he made for himself and those 
who were called into being by his literary tri- 
umphs. Here again I think Poe failed to hit it 



54 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

off, as he might have done. Though he labored 
at the gentle art of making enemies with much 
diligence, he never utilized them with brilliant 
success in a literary way (most of the criticism 
which procured him his enemies is hack-writing, 
not literature). For example, he did not make 
his enemies serve both his wit and reputation, 
as Heine so well knew how to do. The latter 
turned his foes into copy; throughout his life 
they were his chief literary asset, and I have 
no doubt that he almost loved them for the lit- 
erature they enabled him to make. This is the 
most exquisite revenge upon a literary rival — 
to make him your pot-boiler and bread-winner 
as well as a feeder to your fame and glory. It 
was beyond Poe, and, therefore, the chronicle 
of his grudges has for us hardly more piquancy 
than the tale of his borrowings. 

But his biographers weary us with it, as if 
the matter were of real importance. Nonsense ! 
Our literary manners are doubtless improved 
since Poe's day; the brethren are surely not so 
hungry, and there is more fodder to go round 
(I have said this is not a literary effort). Still 
the civility is rather assumed than real; there 
is much spiteful kicking of shins under the 
table; and private lampoons take the place of 



THE POE LEGEND 55 

the old public personalities. I grant that au- 
thors are more generous in their attitude to- 
ward one another than formerly, and the fact 
cannot be disputed that they are fervently sin- 
cere in their praise of — the dead ones ! 

No, we shall not condemn Poe for the ene- 
mies he made. The printed word breeds hos- 
tility and aversion that the writer wots not of 
— yea, his dearest friends, scanning his page 
with jealous eye, shall take rancor from his 
most guileless words and cherish it in their 
bosoms against him. Write, and your friends 
will love you till they hate you ; for there is no 
fear and jealousy in the world like those that 
lurk in the printed word. Write then, write 
deeply enough, down to the truth of your own 
soul, below the shams of phrase and convention, 
below your insincerities of self — and you shall 
have enemies to your heart's desire. The man 
who could print much and still make no ene- 
mies,* has never yet appeared on this planet. 

* One W. C. Brownell, writing in "Scribner's Magazine," 
evinces a kind of rage that a man so weak, so faulty and 
ill-governed, an artist so capricious, slight and motiveless, 
should have wrought himself into the unforgetting heart of 
humanity. Whatever may bethe explanation, we know that 
is the oflFence which a certain brand of critics will never 
forgive Poe. Drunken, debauched and devil-driven, per- 
haps the man often was; but the rare Poet whom the world 
will ever cherish was brother to Israfel, and not less divine. 



56 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Certainly It was not he who struggled desper- 
ately for the poorest living in and about New 
York some seventy-odd years ago; who saw his 
young wife die in want and misery, with the 
horror of officious charity at the door; who not 
long afterwards, and in a kindly dream (as I 
must think it) left all this coil of trouble and 
sorrow behind him, bequeathing to immortality 
the fame of Edgar Allan Poe. 



Ill 

IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL * 

IN many States of the Union there are laws 
on the statute books that penalize liberty 
of thought and speech. 
These laws are mostly derived from Colonial 
times and the barbarous intolerance of the Old 
World. They are an organic link between us 
and the British tyranny from which our patriot 
fathers appealed to the sword. No statesman 
or legislator has the courage to demand that 
they be repealed or annulled. It is supposed 
that the moral sense of the people is somehow 
concerned in their being kept alive — or at least 
in a state of suspended animation and potential 
menace. 

* In this paper I treat Ingersoll romantically (as in keep- 
ing with the spirit of my book), as a personality and a man 
of literary as well as oratorical gifts, certainly an American 
Notable — if we have ever produced one. 

I dare not slight his peculiar religious views, but I have 
touched the polemic side lightly and mainly to the end of 
bringing into relief the Man of Genius and the Humani- 
tarian. Surely it is hardly warrantable to speak or think 
of the Colonel as a spent influence ; his books sell always, his 
charm as a Personality, as an Orator and a Writer is saving 
him in spite of his — I grant — unpopular agnosticism. The 
great glowing heart of the man redeems his cold infidelity. 

57 



58 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

So these cruel old laws are not disturbed by 
pious legislators, who would make no bones at 
all of trading In public franchises, or of acting 
on any proposition with the "Immoral major- 
ity". Hypocrisy and fraud respect in these 
ancient statutes the "wisdom" of our ancestors, 
and still affect to see in them a safeguard for 
religion. Hypocrisy and fraud unite to keep 
them on the law-books where they lie, asleep 
it may be, but ready-fanged and poisoned 
should they be evoked at any time to do their 
ancient office. Many people would be glad to 
have these infamous laws erased from the 
statute-books, but they do nothing about it. 
The public sense of hypocrisy stands in the way. 
Legislators fear the protest of what Is called 
"organized rehglon". Liberty continues to be 
disgraced In the house of her friends. 

New Jersey has laws of this kind. Some- 
thing over three decades ago one of them was 
waked from its long sleep in order to punish a 
man who had exercised the right of free speech. 
By a strange contradiction — the result of yok- 
ing the Era of Liberty with the Age of Oppres- 
sion — this right of free speech is guaranteed in 
the Constitution of New Jersey, under which 
the old cruel Colonial law is allowed to operate. 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 59 

That is to say, the Constitution both guarantees 
and penalizes the same privilege — a beautiful 
example of consistency arising from respect for 
the "wisdom of our ancestors". 

The trial attracted universal attention be- 
cause the bravest and ablest advocate of free 
speech in our time appeared for the defence. 
Outside of the great principle involved, there 
was little in the case to engage the interest or 
sympathies of Colonel IngersoU. The defend- 
ant was an obscure ex-minister named Reynolds, 
who had gone over to infidelity. Religion, it 
must be granted, lost less than Reynolds, who 
seems to have been unable to maintain himself 
as a preacher of liberal doctrine. No doubt 
many ministers have profited by his example 
and stayed where they were — the free thought 
standard of ability is perhaps not much lower 
than the evangelical. This Reynolds printed 
and circulated some literature about the Bible. 
It was merely puerile and foolish, but some 
people who looked upon Reynolds as a nuisance 
(which I fear he was) and wanted to punish 
him, thought it a good case for the old Colonial 
statute against blasphemy. Accordingly they 
invoked it, and hence the trial. 

The result of this now famous trial for bias- 



6o AN ATTIC DREAMER 

phemy proves that a law on the statute-book, 
no matter how antiquated, bigoted and absurd 
— and this was all three in the superlative de- 
gree — outweighs with a jury the utmost logic 
and eloquence of the ablest advocate. Such is 
the superstition of law, and such is our enlight- 
ened wisdom in jealously preserving these be- 
quests from the blind and tyrannous bigotry of 
the Old World. 

We need not condemn the twelve Jersey jury- 
men for sinning against light — darkness was 
there in the law and demanded judgment at 
their hands. Of course, they enjoyed the Colo- 
nel's eloquence; his marvellous pleading; his 
logic that built up and buttressed a whole struc- 
ture of argument, while his oratory ravished 
them; his flashes of wit that disarmed every 
prejudice; his persuasive power that almost 
convinced them they were free men with no 
slightest obligation to the servile past. Yes, it 
must have been like a wonderful play to these 
simple Jerseymen. No doubt they congratu- 
lated themselves that they were privileged 
spectators, seeing and hearing it for nothing; 
and they talked or will talk of it to their dying 
day. I think myself it was one of the most 
effective and powerful addresses ever made to a 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 6i 

jury — one of the finest appeals ever uttered in 
behalf of liberty — and it will be honored as it 
deserves when this Nation shall be truly free. 

I daresay some of these Jerseymen were 
wavering when the Colonel sat down at last — 
how could they help it? But the prosecutor 
reminded them (without any eloquence) of 
their obligations to city, county and State. 
Above all, there is the Law — what are you 
going to do about that, gentlemen? No mat- 
ter whether it was passed some two hundred 
years ago and carried over from Oppression to 
Liberty — no matter whether it was made for a 
state of civilization or barbarism, if you 
please, which we have outgrown — there it 
stands, the Law which safeguards the Church 
and the Home — the law which you are sworn 
to maintain. 

Something like this, no doubt, the prosecutor 
must have said, but his remarks were few — he 
did not care to invite a comparison. Besides, 
he knew his jurymen. 

Colonel IngersoU had made a speech that will 
live forever. 

He lost his case. 

New Jersey lost an opportunity. 



62 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

II 

A GREAT many people contend that we 
now enjoy in this country as much liberty 
(or toleration) as is good for us. To aim at 
the full measure which Colonel Ingersoll advo- 
cated is, in the opinion of these people, to ad- 
vance the standard of Anarchy. 

By this reasoning a man who is only half or 
three-quarters well is better off than one in per- 
fect health. 

Complete freedom is complete well-being. 

Colonel Ingersoll was the foremost cham- 
pion in our time of the rights of the liberal 
spirit. 

It has been urged that he spent the best part 
of his life threshing out old theological straw, 
fighting battles that had been thoroughly fought 
out long before his day. Singularly enough, 
this position is usually taken by persons attached 
to the theological system against which Inger- 
soll waged a truceless war. There may be some 
virtue in the argument, but surely it is not that 
of consistency. 

Let us be fair. Ingersoll was no mere echo 
and imitator of the great liberals who pre- 
ceded him. He had a message of his own to 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 63 

his own generation. He was the best- 
equipped, most formidable and persistent advo- 
cate of the liberal principle which this country, 
at least, has ever known; and it is extremely 
doubtful if his equal as a popular propagan- 
dist was to be found anywhere. "^^ 

He took new ground. He carried the flag 
farther than any of his predecessors. He 
fought without compromise, neither seeking 
nor giving quarter. He believed in the sacred- 
ness of his cause — the holy cause of liberty. 
His was no tepid devotion, no Laodicean fer- 
vor, no timid acquiescence dictated by reason 
and half denied by fear. 

That uncertain allegiance of the soul which 
Macaulay describes as the "paradise of cold 
hearts", was not for him. The temper of his 
zeal for liberty can be likened only to a con- 
suming flame; it burned with ever-increasing 
ardor through all the years of his long life; 
it was active up to the very moment when jeal- 
ous Death touched his eloquent lips with silence. 

It was a grand passion, and, like every grand 
passion, it had grand results. 

Heine has said that no man becomes greatly 
famous without passion ; that it is the mark by 



64 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

which we know the inspired man from the mere 
servant or spectator of events. 

I see this mark in Abraham Lincoln — in the 
Gettysburg speech, in the Proclamation, and 
some of the Messages. The divine passion 
that announces a man with a mission and a 
destiny beyond his fellows. 

I see this mark in Robert G. IngersoU. I 
have lately read the greater part of his work — 
lectures, speeches, controversial writings — and 
the cumulative sense I take from it is that of 
wonder at the passion of the man. Perhaps it 
never found better, never attained higher, ex- 
pression than in these words : 

"I plead for light, for air, for opportunity. 
I plead for individual independence. I plead 
for the rights of labor and of thought. I plead 
for a chainless future. Let the ghosts go — 
justice remains. Let them disappear — men 
and women and children are left. Let the mon- 
sters fade away — the world is here with its 
hills and seas and plains, with its seasons of 
smiles and frowns, its spring of leaf and bud, 
its summer of shade and flower and murmuring 
stream, its autumn with the laden boughs, when 
the withered banners of the corn are still and 
gathered fields are growing strangely wan; 
while death, poetic death, with hands that color 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 65 

what they touch, weaves in the autumn wood 
her tapestries of gold and brown. 

"The world remains with its winters and 
homes and fire-sides, where grow and bloom the 
virtues of our race. Let the ghosts go — we 
will worship them no more. 

"Man is greater than these phantoms. 
Humanity is grander than all the creeds, than 
all the books. Humanity is the great sea, and 
these creeds, and books, and religions are but 
the waves of a day. Humanity is the sky, and 
these religions and dogmas and theories are but 
the mists and clouds changing continually, des- 
tined finally to melt away. 

"That which is founded on slavery, and fear, 
and ignorance cannot endure." 



Ill 

IT IS agreed by the opponents of Colonel 
Ingersoll that he was without influence upon 
the intelligent thought of his time — by which 
intelligent thought they perhaps mean to com- 
pliment themselves! 

If this be true, we lack an explanation of the 
fact that his books and lectures are selling by 
the thousands, both in this country and in Eng- 
land. If the testimony of the bookstalls 
amounts to anything, then the great Agnostic 



66 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

did not cast his "seed of perdition" upon barren 
ground. Whether for right or wrong, whether 
for good or evil, his word is marching on. 

From the Silence that comes to all men he 
has gained a higher claim upon our attention, 
a more valid right to plead. We remember 
that he was faithful unto death. With the 
cessation of that defiant personality, about 
which so long raged the din of controversy, men 
have leave to study his best thought in the dry 
light of reason. He that is dead overcometh. 

During his life Colonel IngersoU gave and 
took many hard blows — that is, he fought his 
adversaries with the weapons of their choice. 

Often it seemed to those who were in sym- 
pathy with much that he said, with much that 
he contended for, that he might have used 
softer words; that he might have dealt less bru- 
tally with inherited beliefs and prejudices; in 
short, that he might have employed rosewater 
instead of vitriol. 

The answer to this is, Colonel IngersoU 
fought without compromise. From his first 
public utterance he made his position plain. 
He never faltered, shuffled or equivocated. He 
knew that mutual compliments cloud the issue ; 
he asked none, gave none. 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 67 

But the fact really is, he was far kinder and 
more charitable toward his adversaries than 
they were toward him. Besides, they had a 
great advantage in unkindness : they were al- 
ways sending him to their Hell — and he had no 
Hell to send them to ! 

However, I do not believe that Colonel In- 
gersoll would have fared much better at the 
hands of the clergy had he, while professing 
infidelity, made his declaration of unfaith in 
the mildest and most colorless terms. Euphe- 
mism would not have saved the Colonel, and 
this he well knew, having one of the most logi- 
cal minds in the world. 

No infidel was ever so tender toward the 
sensibilities of the orthodox as Ernest Renan, 
who, though he left the altar, yet (as Ingersoll 
shrewdly said) carried the incense a great part 
of his journey with him. 

Renan's attitude toward the old Faith which 
he had renounced was that of a sentimental 
iconoclast — but an iconoclast, for all that. He 
wrote his "Life of Jesus" with a kind of pious 
infidelity, coloring it with such euphemism, han- 
dling it with such precaution, that some persons 
took it for an orthodox account. He discloses 
his motive in the prefaces, but almost suppresses 



68 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

it in the body of the book. His criticism is the 
best in the world, his romance no better than 
Chateaubriand's — a woman said that the "Life 
of Jesus" read as if it were going to end with 
a marriage ! In my poor opinion, one or two 
chapters of Renan's "Recollections" are worth 
"The Life of Jesus". 

Renan loved the grand old Church which 
had educated him, as his "dearest foe". His 
mind had been formed by contact with her at a 
hundred points. The poetry of her ritual, the 
pomp of her service, the grandeur of her titles, 
the majesty of her spiritual dominion, never 
quite lost their power to impress his soul — even 
when he was prophesying that the days of her 
greatness were numbered. He spoke of the 
clergy always with respect, often with compli- 
ment, declaring in his latest book that he had 
never known a bad priest. He abhorred all 
coarseness, all invective, all vulgarity, all vio- 
lence. Nothing common, low or brutal was 
ever suffered to mar the translucent mirror of 
his perfect style. In theory a democrat, he had 
the mental manners which are fostered by a 
clerical aristocracy. Every faculty of his mind 
paid homage to the Church, except his reason. 
Renan never lost his feeling of reverence for 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 69 

the sacred mysteries of the Faith in which his 
youth was cradled — but he wrote the "Prayer 
on the Acropolis". He rebuked Strauss and 
Feuerbach for the ruthless way in which they 
attacked the Christian legend — he pleaded for 
tenderness in demolishing a religion which had 
been the hope of the world. He confessed that 
he never could wholly put off the cassock, and 
he seemed like an unfrocked bishop on the 
heights of science. If ever an infidel deserved 
charity at the hands of the clergy, that infidel 
was Renan. 

Did he get it? The answer is, that not even 
Voltaire was assailed with a greater virulence 
of ecclesiastical rancor — the most infernal mal- 
ice ever planted in the heart of man.* 

Alas, the ecclesiastical spirit too often seems 
the same in all ages ! It crucified Jesus of 
Nazareth, it burned Giordano Bruno. When 
Servetus writhed at the stake in his death 
agony, Calvin, his murderer, drew nearer, 
saluted him as the son of the Devil and piously 
committed his soul to Hell. 

* This r€mark admits of some notable exceptions. Father 
William Barry, an eminent English writer, has done a fair 
and justly appreciative Life of Renan (Scribner's) while 
making no concession to his agnostic views. Several priests 
who knew Renan in his youth or during his novitiate have 
written of him with respect and humane feeling. 



70 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Renan was cursed and slandered with that 
special ingenuity which has always belonged to 
the custodians of Divine Truth, and the priests 
whom he was in the habit of complimenting, 
with great fervor of unanimity saluted him as 
the Anti-Christ I 

Colonel Ingersoll's reasoning was good. 
Compliments are vain in an irreconcilable con- 
flict. 

IV 

MOST speeches are not literature — they 
do not read as they were heard, as they 
were spoken. Lacking the living voice, the 
speaking eye, the personality from which they 
derived their force, they seem cold, inanimate, 
without that vital principle which is the product 
of genius and art. 

The orator's triumphs are usually short-lived, 
like those of an actor. They are the children 
of the time, not of the eternities. 

But there are exceptions, though rare, and 
among these we may reckon the best speeches 
of Colonel Ingersoll. 

Our American literature has nothing better 
of their kind than the Decoration Day Ora- 
tion, the lectures on Ghosts, Orthodoxy, Super- 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 71 

stition, Individuality, Liberty for Man, Woman 
and Child, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Humboldt, 
Thomas Paine, and some others. 

These are so vital, so charged with intellec- 
tual power, so instinct with a passionate love 
of truth and justice, so eloquent and logical, 
so clear and convincing — above all, so readable 
— that they can afford to dispense with the 
living voice — that is, they are, in a true sense, 
literature. 

I doubt if this enviable distinction belongs 
in equal measure to the work of any other 
American orator. 

The explanation is, that Colonel Ingersoll 
was an artist as well as an orator: he knew 
that without the preserving touch of art, the 
most impassioned oratory soon goes back to 
common air. He was one of the great masters 
of our English speech, never seeking the ab- 
struse or the obsolete, believing that the tongue 
of Shakespeare was adequate to every neces- 
sity of argument, every excursion of fancy, 
every sentiment of poetry, every demand of 
oratory. 

His skill in construction, in antithesis, in 
balancing periods, in leading up to the lofty 
climax which crowned the whole, was that of 



72 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

a wizard of speech. He never fell short or 
came tardy off — his means were always ade- 
quate to his ends and the close of every speech 
was like a strain of music. Rich as his mind 
was, immense his intellectual resources, un- 
daunted the bravery of his spirit, there was yet 
manifest in all his work the wise husbandry of 
genius. His power never ran to excess; never 
dwindled to impotence. 

Nature, too, is economical and dislikes to 
double her gifts: yet this man was a true poet 
as well as a great orator. I have quoted above 
a paragraph from one of his orations, which 
is the fine gold of sterling poetry. 

Charles Lamb tells us that "Prose hath her 
harmonies no less than Verse", and we know 
that the speech of every true orator is rhythmic. 
It was eminently so with Colonel Ingersoll, 
who, like Dickens, often fell unconsciously into 
blank verse. Here are a few examples taken 
at random; and first this bit of what we are 
now calling "nature poetry" : 

The rise and set of sun, 

The birth and death of day. 

The dawns of silver and the dusks of gold, 

The wonders of the rain and snow, 

The shroud of winter and 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 73 

The many-colored robes of spring; 
The lonely moon with nightly loss or gain, 
The serpent lightning and the thunder's voice, 
The tempest's fury and the breath of morn. 
The threat of storm and promise of the bow. 

Nothing could excel in beauty and metrical 
grace this description of the old classic myths : 

They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremu- 
lous desire, 

Made tawny Summer's billowed breast the 
throne and home of Love; 

Filled Autumn's arms with sun-kissed grapes 
and gathered sheaves; 

And pictured Winter as a weak old king 

Who felt, like Lear, upon his withered face, 
Cordelia's tears. 

This on Shakespeare, reveals the poet in the 
orator: 

He knew the thrills and ecstasies of love. 

The savage joys of hatred and revenge. 

He heard the hiss of envy's snakes 

And watched the eagles of ambition soar. 

There was no hope that did not put its star 

above his head — 
No fear he had not felt — 
No joy that had not shed its sunshine on his 

face. 



74 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

The critics, I am aware, make this kind of 
writing a fault in prose, but we should be glad 
to get real poetry, wherever we may find it. 
Colonel Ingersoll's greatest distinction as a 
poet is, that he never fails to interest us: — in 
this particular, at least, the regular metre-mon- 
gers may well envy him. 



I LIKE his distinct literary style — the style 
of his miscellanies, of his controversial 
papers, of his occasional bits of wisdom and 
fancy and criticism. Perhaps the thoroughly 
human side of the man is best seen in these un- 
related efforts — these vagrant children of his 
mind. You know that this man thought before 
he took the pen in hand. He writes without 
pretence, without the vices of the literary habit, 
without artifice or evasion, — clearly, frankly, 
as a gentleman should speak. In written con- 
troversy he was relentless in his logic, — press- 
ing the point home, — but unfailing in courtesy. 
As he himself would have said, his mental man- 
ners were good — they were at any rate "sweet- 
ness and light" compared with those of his 
adversaries. 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 75 

He did not profess to love his enemies, yet 
he treated them more humanely than many who 
made that profession. 

We are never to forget that the chief article 
of his offending was, that he made war upon 
the Dogma of an everlasting Hell. 

In his controversies he was never worsted, 
from a rational standpoint (sic), and his vic- 
tories seem not less due to his own fairness in 
argument and tenacity of logic than to the 
weakness and confusion of his opponents. The 
natural and supernatural can not maintain a 
profitable argument. They can never agree 
and, strictly speaking, one can not overcome 
the other — they occupy separate realms. 

It is useless for a man who believes in 
miracles to argue with a man who does not — a 
miracle and a fact are in the nature of things 
irreconcilable. 

Renan said to the theologians, "Come, gen- 
tlemen, let us have one miracle here before 
the savants in Paris — that will end the dispute 
forever." He asked in vain — miracles are no 
longer granted for the conversion of infidels, 
and if they occur at all, it is before witnesses 
whose faith predisposes them to belief. It 
may be hazarded that no one ever believed 



76 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

in a miracle who did not wish to believe in 
it. 

In a purely rational view it must be allowed 
that the honors of controversy usually fell to 
Colonel Ingersoll. His apparent victories 
were, of course, easily waived by those who be- 
lieved that they had Divine Truth on their 
side. Yet they m.ust have regretted that the 
supernatural can be so ill defended. That all 
the advantage of reason would seem to be with 
the enemy of light. That one who can make 
himself understood should prevail over the 
champion of Revealed Truth, which is in its 
nature incomprehensible. That it should be 
so hard to square reason with revelation, fact 
with fable, method with miracle, dreams with 
demonstrations. 

Of all these tourneys of skill and wit and 
logic. Colonel Ingersoll is seen at his best in 
his reply to Gladstone. Perhaps nothing that 
he ever did more thoroughly certifies the power 
and keenness of his mind, the bed-rock of his 
convictions. He was like an athlete rejoicing 
in his strength; merciful to his adversary, as 
feeling that the victory was sure; always con- 
scious of his power, but ruling himself with 
perfect poise. The one touch of malice he al- 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 77 

lowed himself was when he quoted for Mr. 
Gladstone's benefit the saying of Aristotle, that 
"clearness is the virtue of style" : — this arrow 
pierced the heart of the British behemoth. 

In truth Mr. Gladstone, the master of many 
languages, the world-famed orator, the "most 
learned layman of Europe", appeared at a 
manifest disadvantage in his duel with the 
American. He tried to write in the "Bishop's 
voice", to overawe his adversary with Greek 
and Latin quotations, omitting to give the Eng- 
lish equivalent. He begged the question, floun- 
dered about it, did everything but argue it, and 
finally took refuge behind the "exuberance of 
his own verbosity". Colonel IngersoU, cool, 
urbane, inflexible, asked only for the facts ; Mr. 
Gladstone, flustered, irritated, conscious of his 
weakness, had apparently none to give and 
raised a cloud of words. The world waited 
eagerly for Mr. Gladstone's rejoinder : it never 
came, and the trophies of debate seemed to rest 
with the American. Needless to say, this left 
the great Question still at issue. 



78 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

VI 

COLONEL INGERSOLL has been so 
slandered and defamed by the intemper- 
ate friends of orthodox religion that many peo- 
ple have no just idea of the man or of the prin- 
ciples for which he contended. Slander is too 
often the favorite weapon of persons who claim 
to love their enemies as themselves. It was 
used so effectively against Voltaire that even at 
this late day many liberal Christians are afraid 
to read him. 

Separating the odium theologicum from the 
argument and the slanderous motive of those 
who libel a sublime cause by their uncharity, let 
us see how the matter really stands. 

Did Ingersoll say there is no God? 

No; he said he did not know. 

What did he deny as to God? 

He denied the existence of the personal Jew- 
ish God — the Jehovah of the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures. 

He denied and repudiated the dogma of an 
eternal Hell, said to have been made by Jehovah 
in order to gratify his revenge upon the great 
majority of the human race. 

Did he attack Christianity? 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 79 

He attacked only what he conceived to be 
the evil part of it, in so far as it justified 
and continued the curses of the Old Testament. 
He made a distinction between the real and 
the theological Christ: the first he honored as 
a great moral teacher and a martyr of freedom, 
killed by the orthodox priests of his day; the 
second he denied and repudiated as a creation 
of men. 

Did he believe in a Hereafter? 

He believed that no one could know whether 
there is or is not a future life of the soul. But 
he was not without the hope of immortality 
which has in all ages cheered and fortified the 
heart of man. 

It follows from all this that he did not accept 
the Revelation of the Hebrew Bible, its cos- 
mogony, geology or morality; nor the New 
Testament with its Scheme of Atonement and 
threat of Eternal Damnation — God suffering 
in his own person for the sins of the world, yet 
condemning the far greater number of his chil- 
dren to everlasting pain. 

What positive effect had his example and 
teaching? 

It liberalized the creeds in spite of them- 
selves. 



8o AN ATTIC DREAMER 

It made the preaching of Hell unpopular. 

It made for sanity in religion and enlarged 
the province of honest doubt. 

It caused men to think more of the simple 
human virtues and less of the theological ones. 

There is no doubt at all that it saved many 
from the madhouse who might have accused 
themselves of committing the Unpardonable 
Sin. 

It helped to make better husbands, kinder 
fathers, more loyal and loving sons. 

It was a great step toward freedom and 
light. It enlarged the horizon of hope — it 
advanced the standard of liberty. 

Colonel Ingersoll was a free man, talking in 
a country where all are presumed to be free, yet 
his courage, more than the laws, protected him. 

He upheld public and private morality and 
was himself an exemplar of both. 

He loved only one woman as his wife and 
lived with her in perfect honor and fidelity. He 
loved his children and was idolized by them. 

His abilities and services reflected honor 
upon the state. 

It is agreed that but for his religious views, 
he might have reached the greatest honor in 
the Nation's gift. As it is, he has gained a 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 8i 

place in the Republic of Intellect to which few 
of our Presidents may aspire. 

His crime was, that he had elected to exer- 
cise his reason, had interrogated Revelation, 
put Moses in the witness-box, and asked for the 
facts. 

, VII 

IT IS claimed by certain critics that Colonel 
Ingersoll, being defective in scientific equip- 
ment as well as in exact scholarship, was unable 
to produce such effects by his teaching as might 
otherwise have been feared by the orthodox. 
It seems to me the contention is quite unsup- 
ported by logic or fact. True, Colonel Inger- 
soll was neither a Darwin nor a Huxley, neither 
a Tyndall nor a Spencer. He lacked the special 
training and scientific grasp of all these, as well 
as the searching erudition and ripened philo- 
sophic spirit of Ernest Renan, in our time the 
chief protagonist in the domain of liberal 
thought. But had Colonel Ingersoll been other 
than he was, it is doubtful if he would have 
achieved so distinct an effect. In mere scholar- 
ship he was at least equal if not superior to 
Thomas Paine, and he was no more unscientific 
than Voltaire. As a propagandist of liberal 



82 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

opinions, and as a living force, he was far 
greater than the former by virtue of the free 
play accorded to his vigorous and persuasive 
eloquence. That his influence in no way ap- 
proaches that of Voltaire, Is not a fact which 
demands explanation. A stream can not rise 
higher than Its source. The whole liberal 
movement may almost be said to have pro- 
ceeded from the great Frenchman, whose por- 
tentous eminence remains secured to him alone. 
But if Ingersoll was neither scientific in a 
profound sense, nor cultured in a scholastic one, 
he was not the less manifestly cut out for his 
work. He gave his audiences just what they 
expected to get and were glad to pay for — ora- 
tory, which it serves no purpose now to dis- 
parage and which, In spite of all disparagement, 
often rose to a noble height and strain. Wit 
that played like lambent lightning about the old 
structures of belief, showing many an obscure 
niche and cranny that, mayhap, had escaped 
the torches of earlier investigators. Pathos 
that proved the poet in the orator and needed 
only a metrical expression — nay, sometimes un- 
consciously attained it. Humor that evinced 
this man's sympathetic touch with his fellow 
men and that not seldom won their regard 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 83 

when all the protean resources of his eloquence 
had failed to persuade. Lastly, a gracious and 
noble presence, 

Where every god did seem to set his seal 
To give the world assurance of a man; 

and a voice whose thriUing organ melody it will 
long be the solace of many thousands to have 
heard. 

How much of the Colonel will live as a per- 
manent legacy, is a graver question than that of 
his influence upon his contemporaries. Ltttera 
scripta manet, and the IngersoUian word is, 
essentially, the spoken word. Most of his 
writings are cast in the form of speeches; were 
obviously written to be delivered as such. John 
Morley notes this as a sensible depreciation 
of a great part of Macaulay's brilliant work. 

The finer note addressed to the mental ear 
is more palpably lacking in the American. One 
sees this at once by turning from Colonel Inger- 
soll's speeches to the papers of his controversy 
with Gladstone, to which I have already re- 
ferred. In these letters Colonel Ingersoll dis- 
plays a closeness of reasoning, a dialectic fence, 
an analytic subtlety, which are quite foreign 
to his ordinary processes. The fact is, that 



84 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Colonel IngersoU, being a born pleader and 
skilled, moreover, in a long course of forensic 
training, adopted too much, perhaps, in his 
speeches, the lawyer's plan of making the most 
of the adversary's weak points. Hence, the 
brutality, at times, of IngersoU's philippics 
against the Christian religion, and hence, also, 
the unlikelihood of their being permanently em- 
bodied in the canon of liberal faith. The keen- 
ness of the critical spirit was in Colonel Inger- 
soU; in its charity he was often wanting. 

VIII 

COLONEL INGERSOLL belongs with 
the select company of the great Ameri- 
cans. 

He is of the fellowship of Jefferson and 
Franklin, of Lincoln and Sumner. His pa- 
triotism was second only to his passion for uni- 
versal liberty. He loved his country beyond 
everything except freedom. He was not a fire- 
side patriot — the temper of his devotion had 
been proved in the baptism of battle. His pa- 
triotic speeches rank with the best in our Htera- 
ture : the Vision of War is as high an utterance 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 85 

as Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech and as surely 
immortal. 

He was a great American, loving liberty, 
fraternity, equality. He hated the spirit of 
Caste which he saw rising among our people, 
and he struck at it with all the force of his 
honest anger. 

He despised the worship of titles among the 
rich, their tuft-hunting, aping of aristocratic 
airs and mean prostration before the self-styled 
nobility of the Old World. To him the most 
loathsome object in the world was an American 
ashamed of his country. 

He urged that the representatives of repub- 
lics should have precedence at Washington. 
He condemned the flummery of our diplomatic 
etiquette, the foolish kow-towing designed to 
flatter the ambassadors of servile nations. 

His patriotism was purer than that of our 
Christian statesmen who wish to subjugate in 
the name of liberty — to expand in territory and 
contract in honor. 

He was an individualist, believing that equal 
rights and equal opportunities hold the solu- 
tion of every social problem. 

He saw no evil in wealth, save the abuse of 
it, and he did not think it a virtue to be poor. 



86 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

He believed that everyone was entitled to 
comfort, well-being, happiness in this world. 
He denied that God has purposely divided his 
children into rich and poor; he saw in this the 
teaching of a false religious system which has 
sanctioned every oppression and injustice, and 
has cursed the earth with misery. 

He regarded pauperism not as a proof of 
the special favor of God, but as an indictment 
of man. 

He was a lover of justice, of mercy, of hu- 
manity. He was a true friend of the toiling 
millions and in their behalf pleaded for a work- 
ing day of eight hours. Christianity had long 
suffered it, but he was unwilling that a single 
overburdened creature should "curse God and 
die". 

He pleaded for the abolition of the death 
penalty, that relic of savagery. He hated all 
forms of cruelty and violence, but especially 
those that claim the sanction of law. He de- 
nounced the whipping post in Delaware — and 
Delaware replied by a threat to indict him for 
blasphemy. 

He pleaded for the abolition of poverty and 
drunkenness, for the fullest liberation of 
woman, for the rights of the child. 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 87 

His great heart went out in sympathy to 
everything that suffers — to the dumb animals, 
beaten and overladen; to the feathered victims 
of caprice and cruelty. 

The circle of this man's philanthropy was 
complete. He filled the measure of patriotism, 
of civic duty, of the sacred relations of hus- 
band and father, of generosity and kindness 
toward his fellow men. But he had committed 
treason against the Unknown, and this, in spite 
of the fame and success which his talents com- 
manded, made of him a social Pariah. The 
herd admired and envied his freedom, but for 
the most part they gave him the road and went 
by on the other side. 

IX 

THIS country is freer and better for the 
life of Colonel Ingersoll. 

There is more light, more air in the prison- 
house of theology. 

God may be a guess, but man is a certainty; 
men are thinking more of their obligations to- 
ward those about them — the weak, the help- 
less, the fallen, — and less about securing for 
themselves a halo and a harp in the New 
Jerusalem. 



88 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Ingersoll's great lesson that men can not love 
one another if they believe in a God of hate, 
is bearing fruit. 

The hypocrite shall not enter the Kingdom 
of Heaven! 

Truth will yet compel all the churches to 
cease libelling God and to honor humanity. . . . 

The great man whose worth and work I 
have barely glanced at in these pages, said 
bravely, that he cared less for the freedom of 
religion than for the Religion of Freedom. 
When that larger light shall flood the world — 
and not until then — his services to the cause 
of Truth, of Liberty and Humanity will be fitly 
honored. 

As for his literary testament, I find it easy 
to believe that many a noble sentence winged 
with the utmost felicity of speech, many a fine 
sentiment, the fruit of his kindlier thought, 
many a tender word spoken to alleviate the 
sorrow of death, will long remain. Even the 
professed critics who make so small ado of the 
Colonel's literary merits, may well envy him 
the noble essay on Shakespeare, the more 
powerful one on Voltaire, or the beautiful 
memorial tribute to Walt Whitman. And it 
may be that "so long as love kisses the lips of 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 89 

death", so long shall men and women, in the 
nighted hour of grief and loss, bless the name 
of him who touched the great heart of hu- 
manity in that high and unmatched deliverance 
at his brother's grave. . . . 

From a sunken Syrian tomb long antedating 
the Christian era, Ernest Renan brushed away 
the dust and found inscribed thereon the sin- 
gle word, 

"Courage!" 



IV 

RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 

THE Story of the man of genius who 
finds inspiration In another man's wife 
is not a new one, and it may even be 
called trite, but it is one to which the world 
always lends a willing ear. 

This is the story revealed in the English ver- 
sion of the letters of Richard Wagner to Ma- 
thilde Wesendonck. In Germany, sweet land 
of sentiment, the book has reached the twen- 
tieth edition and is generally acclaimed as a 
true classic. In Germany, also, the alleged 
Platonic motive of the letters, elsewhere looked 
at askance, is easily admitted, since, as is well 
known to the nightingales and the lindens, a 
German lover will pursue an ardent courtship 
through a dozen years without daring once to 
put an arm around his divinity's waist. Art 
and love are a great patience in Germany. 

They were surely so in the case of Richard 
Wagner; and it is characteristic of the Teuton 

90 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 91 

that he has left the world in doubt as to 
whether his patience was ever rewarded. 

The doubt is indeed the chief provocation 
of these letters (outside of Germany), and fur- 
nishes the artistic motive by which they will 
endure. 

Or, to put the matter plainly, the other 
man's wife supplies the interest of this book. 
As of many others in the chronicle of great- 
ness. 

Think you, had these letters been addressed 
to Frau Wagner, that all the chaste nightin- 
gales of Germany would now be tuning in their 
praise? Or that our own sentimentalists, with 
the unsexed Corybantes of music, would be 
swelling such a chorus of acclaim? Would the 
world be eager to identify Frau Wagner with 
the conception of "Isolde", and should we be 
hearing all this patter about ideal union of 
souls, spiritual passion, etc., etc.? Not so! — 
the world will not tolerate the indecency of a 
man of genius loving his wife and personifying 
her in the creations of his art. 

There is not a single truly famous book in 
the world's literature, of letters written by a 
man of genius to his wife. 

The letters are always written to some other 



92 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

woman and, preferably, some other man's 
wife. Why this should be so, only the good 
Lord knows who made us as we are. 

Poor Penelope keeps house, often red-eyed 
and sad, during the excursions of genius; she 
treasures up with a broken-hearted care and 
stores away in a lavender-scented drawer with 
the early- love-letters (of which the genius is 
now ashamed) curt messages on postal cards — 
hurry-up requests for clean linen or an ^tra 
"nighty"; express tags speaking eloquently of 
some cheap gift by which the great man dis- 
charged the obligation of writing (preserved 
by the simple soul because he had scrawled her 
name upon them) ; and perhaps a small packet 
of letters that deal wholly with HIS ideas of 
domestic government, usually couched in a 
peevish tone and with a hard selfishness of in- 
tention that strangely contrasts with the man's 
meditated, public revelation of self — not a 
flower of the heart in them all, as poor 
Penelope, starving for a word of love, sees 
through her dropping tears. 

Now these things have some value to a neg- 
lected wife, but they can not usefully be worked 
up in the biography of a man of genius. 

What wonder that Penelope takes into her 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 93 

tender bosom the subtle demon of jealousy, be- 
comes a shrew and a scold, and presently — 
goaded by the man's cold and steady refusal 
to satisfy her by giving her the lo%e which she 
knows with a woman's sure instinct is being 
secretly lavished upon another — what wonder, 
I say, that Penelope under such maddening 
provocation, finding herself a cheated and un- 
loved wife, becomes that favorite handiwork 
of the Devil on this earth — a good woman 
turned into a Fury! 

And the beauty of it is, that at this moment 
she sets out to justify, in the wrong-headed 
fashion of a woman who knows that she can 
take her marriage certificate to Heaven with 
her, — the infidelity of her husband! 

He, being a man of genius, easily gets the 
sympathy of the world — especially of all good 
and virtuous women, every one of whom feels 
that she would have been able to satisfy the 
gifted person and keep him properly straight. 
And the great man adds to the laurel of fame 
the crown of domestic martyrdom. 

Of course, the injured wife might have 
played her game better, but it was not in the 
cards for her to win, — having married a 
genius. 



94 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

So it has come to be an axiom that the art- 
istic temperament disqualifies a man for the 
sober state of matrihiony; and many are the 
cases cited to prove it, from the wife of Socra- 
tes to Jane Welsh Carlyle or Frau Wagner. 
The woes of the unhappily mated genius 
clamor down the ages like the harsh echoes of 
a family row before the policeman reaches the 
corner. Also they make a large figure in what 
is called polite literature, especially as the 
sorely tried genius finds in the sorrows of his 
hearth a strong incentive to the production of 
copy. Hence the thing is not without its com- 
pensations, and the lovers of gossip, who are 
always the chief patrons of literature, do not 
seek their food in vain. 

I suspect that the matter of vanity has much 
to do with cooking the domestic troubles — his 
word is "tragedy" I — of the genius. It is very 
hard to domesticate the species, and wonder- 
ful is the arrogance which the notion of genius 
will breed in the homeliest man, causing him 
to look with easy contempt on the beautiful 
woman who perhaps married him out of pity. 
The artist is the peacock among husbands — his 
lofty soul, his majestic port, his rainbow plu- 
mage, and even, as he thinks, the beauty of his 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 95 

voice — that top note especially ! — move him to 
a measureless disdain of the annoyingly con- 
stant, unvaried and tiresome hero-worship of 
his plain little mate — it is quite curious how, 
after a time, he comes even to ignore her 
beauty. To be sure, she has her home uses, 
and very convenient on occasion these are, even 
to the most glorious of peacocks; but he is for 
the Cosmos and must not limit his resplendency 
to a narrow poultry-yard — go to, woman! 
And there you are. 

Then, of course, the artist must always be 
in quest of new sensations, — in other words, 
must feed his genius, to which satiety is death; 
and it seems to be agreed that such sensations 
and experiences are only to be had from other 
women, or at least, some other woman — and 
how are you going to get away from that? 

I have heard of a certain man, of coarse 
fibre, who would have given his soul to be 
thought an artist; who plotted, asleep and 
awake, during long years, to get rid of his law- 
ful wife and take on a woman he believed to 
be his affinity. The man's passionate desire to 
work this wrong gave him a kind of power and 
eloquence which, strange to say, failed him 
when at last he had succeeded in carrying out 



96 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

his purpose. And then, so gossip ran, he wished 
to win the old love back again (coupled in his 
memory with both unrest and power) , but that, 
of course, was hopeless; so that verily the last 
state of this man was worse than the first. 

All of which is not without bearing upon the 
story of Richard Wagner and Mathilde We- 
sendonck. 

I am not concerned to upset the Platonic 
theory, so dear to German sentimentalists, of 
the love-affair between the great Wagner and 
the wife of Herr Wesendonck. People will 
judge according to the evidence and their pri- 
vate feelings. It must be allowed that there 
are expressions in the letters that would go far 
toward establishing a crim. con. in the case of 
any but a German like Wagner, and a master 
sentimentalist at that. Such a passage as this 
for example: 

"Once more, that thou couldst hurl thyself 
on every conceivable sorrow of the world to 
say to me, 'I love thee', redeemed me anc^ won 
for me that 'solemn pause' whence my life has 
gained another meaning. 

"But that state divine indeed was only to be 
won at cost of all the griefs and pains of love — 
we have drunk them to their very dregs ! And 
now, after suffering every sorrow, being spared 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 97 

no grief, now must the quick of that higher life 
show clearly what we have won through all the 
agony of those birth-throes." 

I repeat, only a German sentimentalist could 
hold such language without compelling an ob- 
vious conclusion. The fact that in the face 
of this and similarly passionate avowals, public 
opinion in Germany absolves the lovers of any 
positive guilt in their relations, is a high tribute 
to that national virtue which was anciently cele- 
brated by Tacitus and more recently by Hein- 
rich Heine. 

It is the greater pity that the present Eng- 
lish translation should have been made by a 
gushing, lymphatic person, one W. Ashton 
Ellis, who instead of suffering the letters to 
speak for themselves, writes a silly preface 
wherein he seeks to clear Frau Wesendonck's 
character, in advance, and thereby naturally 
awakens the reader's doubts. I protest but for 
this marplot fellow I should have set it all 
down to the account of German sentimentalism 
and have laid the book aside without hearing 
anything worse than the nightingale in the 
linden, pouring forth his soul in the enchanted 
moonlight of German poesy. But now it is 
spoiled for me by such twaddle as this: 



98 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

"This placid, sweet Madonna, the perfect 
emblem of a pearl, not opal, her eyes still 
dreaming of Nirvana, — no ! emphatically no I 
she could not once have been swayed by carnal 
passion. In these letters all is pure and spirit- 
ual, a Dante and a Beatrice; so must it have 
been in their intercourse." 

Which illustrates how the defence is so often 
fatal in matters of literary biography. And yet 
I have not heard of a literary man wise enough 
to ask that neither his memory nor his acts 
should ever be defended. 

Many a small person contrives to attract a 
moment's notice by defending the silent great. 

Fame has no more subtle irony. 

Richard Wagner met Mathilde Wesendonck 
in 1852 when he was forty years old and she 
twenty-four. He had already written "Rienzi", 
"The Flying Dutchman", "Tannhauser" and 
"Lohengrin". Nobody has ever dreamed of 
attributing the inspiration of any of these 
works to his wife Minna. 

It is seldom indeed that a woman is credited 
with inspiring a man of genius — after she has 
married him. As a literary theory the thing 
is not popular. 

Wagner's wife had been an opera singer. 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 99 

It is admitted even by the great man's jealous 
biographers, that she was of more than ordi- 
nary beauty, that she shared bravely his early 
hardships and that she was a pure and loyal 
wife. 

But it seems certain that she did not inspire 
the great man. In his later life he was wont to 
say that his wedlock had been nothing but a 
trial of his patience and pity; perhaps he was 
indebted for this to his vanity rather than his 
recollection. 

Mathilde, on the contrary, was Wagner's in- 
spiration, for has he not told us so ? — though, 
to be sure, we may credit her with inspiring 
only one opera, "Tristan and Isolde". Unfor- 
tunately, she was the wife of another man, but 
again, fortunately, her husband was of a truly 
Germanic simpHcity and childlike trust. 

Herr Wesendonck was also a man of means 
and could give his wife the indulgence of many 
luxuries and whims, which must have added to 
her attractiveness in the eyes of the struggling 
man of genius. Money has never been known 
to cheapen the charms of a really desirable 
woman. 

Portraits of Mathilde show a Madonna-like 
face of pure and delicate outline, with eyes of 



loo AN ATTIC DREAMER 

haunting tenderness and a mouth of sensitive 
appeal — such Hps, so sweet yet sad, so inviting 
yet so free from sensual suggestion, are seen 
only among the higher types of German beauty. 
Not, I grant you, a face indicating carnal pas- 
sion, but what then? — many a woman who 
looked like a Madonna has loved not wisely 
but too well, and some have been known to 
bear children in the human fashion. 

I have never seen a portrait of Herr We- 
sendonck. 

Truly he deserves one for consenting to the 
romance which has immortalized his name. 
Wagner seems to have felt this when he once 
wrote Herr Wesendonck that the latter should 
have a place with him in the history of art. In 
this letter Wagner says nothing of the fine set 
of horns which (outside of Germany) an evil- 
minded generation has freely awarded his 
generous friend. 

Mark here again the gushing Ellis : 

"It is as a knightly figure that he (Herr 
Wesendonck) will ever abide in the memory 
of all who met him, and surely truer knightli- 
ness than he displayed in a singularly difficult 
conjuncture, can nowhere have been found out- 
side King Arthur's court. Undoubtedly it was 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE loi 

he who was the greatest sufferer for several 
years, — by no means Minna, — years of per- 
petual heart-burnings bravely borne." 

Herr Wesendonck was indeed a pattern 
husband for a young woman of romantic 
yearnings. 

He shared her admiration for Wagner's 
genius and for a long time refused to see that 
his wife was actuated by any other motive. 

He gave Wagner financial aid and finally 
offered him, with Minna, a home in a pretty 
cottage on his estate at Zurich. 

He tolerated the connection even after it 
had become the occasion of bitter quarrels on 
his domestic hearth. 

On the whole, I am persuaded that a figure 
of like Chivalry is not to be found outside of 
Germany, nor perhaps anywhere since the noble 
Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. 

Mathilde's few letters tell us nothing — her 
soul is never unveiled — she compels us to take 
Wagner's word for the whole of the romance. 
Her attitude in this correspondence — if such it 
may be called — puts the great man in a dubious 
light. We may not think the less of the artist, 
but the man loses nobility; Herr Wesendonck 
gets his revenge. 



I02 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

But at last Minna Intercepted one of Wag- 
ner's letters to Mathilde (which Is not given 
in this collection) , and delivered it herself, with 
words suiting the occasion. Naturally, this 
broke up the arrangements at Zurich; Wagner 
sent his wife back to her parents and betook 
himself to Venice. Herr Wesendonck's con- 
duct in the circumstances was without a flaw; 
this admirable man seems truly worthy both of 
Germany and Spain. 

There Is a harmless mania for Identifying 
particular persons with poetic creations, and 
with such hints as Wagner constantly threw 
out during the period of their attachment, it 
was impossible that Mathilde should escape. 

"With thee I can do all things," he said, 
"without thee, nothing!" 

This was not strictly true, however, and 
must be taken as poetic license, since he wrote 
several operas before meeting her and did 
some of his greatest work long after the part- 
ing. 

But let me not discourage the sentimentalists. 
It is true that he said, "For having written the 
'Tristan' I thank you from my deepest soul to 
all eternity." 

It is also certain that he used to write his 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 103 

music with a gold pen that Mathilde had given 
him, and that in exile he received from her a 
package of his favorite zwieback with tears of 
joy. For these and other reasons I would not 
deny her title to be regarded as the original 
inspiration of "Tristan and Isolde". 

Still, we have all heard of another enamored 
young person who, when her lover had got 
himself somewhat desperately out of the way — 

"Went on cutting bread and butter." 

Absence, it appears, had some effect in cool- 
ing the romantic fervors of Mathilde. Some 
half-dozen years after the rupture at Zurich, 
that "child of our sorrows, Tristan and 
Isolde", as Wagner lovingly wrote her and to 
which her name for good or evil is now linked 
forever, was produced for the first time in 
Munich. 

Mathilde had the earliest invitation, with 
the composer's own compliments; but she did 
not attend, and the heart of Minna was not 
harrowed by seeing her name "among those 
present". 

It is no reproach to the nightingales of Ger- 
many that they sang longer in the heart of her 
lover. . . . 

And the lindens bloom on immortally. 



IN THE RED ROOM 

SURELY there was nothing supernatural 
about the manner of it. The thing hap- 
pened in a brilliantly lighted room where 
I was one of a hundred persons, all occupied 
with the very material business of dining, and 
dining well. No environment could be more 
unsuited to a visitor or a message from the 
Beyond. The lights, the music, the noise of 
incoming or departing guests, the bustling 
waiters, the hum of joyous conversation punc- 
tuated with the popping of wine corks, the deep 
tones of men, the staccato laughter of women, 
— these were the accompaniment of the 
strangest experience of my life, to which I hesi- 
tate to give a name. 

And then, oh my God! can a Ghost eat? can 
a Ghost drink? can a Ghost talk, and yet attract 
no notice in a crowded company of feasting 
men and women? 

Let me re-word the matter — a thing which 
104 



IN THE RED ROOM 105 

Hamlet tells us "madness would gambol 
from" ; let me by the strictest effort of memory 
and reason strip the supernatural from it, if I 
may. . . . 

I was dining alone in a corner of his favor- 
ite French cafe; in the Red Room, too, of 
whose cheerful warmth and brightness of color 
he had been outspokenly fond in his hearty 
way. He had introduced me to this place and 
here we had often dined together. Here or 
elsewhere, alas, we should dine together no 
more ... he died suddenly in his youth and 
strength some four years ago. 

Always I think of him when I am in the Red 
Room of this cafe, whether alone or in com- 
pany; but this night the thought, the image, 
the vital recollection of him, faultless in every 
detail, possessed me absolutely. I had made 
very little progress with my dinner, and had 
taken but one glass of Chateau Palmer, when I 
resigned myself to the sad pleasure of keep- 
ing tryst with his memory. 

First of all, my mind dwelt on our friend- 
ship : how sweet it was, how firm, how true ; 
with never a doubt to mar it, never a cold wind 
of jealousy or envy to blow upon it. We were 
lovers, — for such friendship between men is a 



io6 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

purer sentiment than the love of man and 
woman, only the nobler emotions of the heart 
being engaged. 

We were neither too old nor too young for a 
real friendship ; both were still well under that 
chilly meridian where men usually part with the 
generosities and enthusiasms of life in order to 
take on the prudences and self-calculations. 
Of the two he was the junior, but he assumed 
a kind of specious seniority by virtue of his 
physical bigness and his greater success in bat- 
tling with the world. O friend, how true in 
your case that the battle is not always to the 
strong I 

I recalled how the anticipation of dining with 
him, in this very Red Room, was quite the most 
exquisite pleasure I have known, no woman 
ever having given me the like — though I am 
anything but a hater of women. And I said 
to myself with a sigh that there were not left 
in all the world three men, the thought of 
dining with whom could yield me an equal joy. 

That is, I maintain, the crucial test of friend- 
ship. Do you like to dine with him? Not 
without a deep meaning was of old the life of 
a man held sacred with whom one had shared 
bread and salt. The sacramental rite of an- 



IN THE RED ROOM 107 

dent hospitality persists under our less simple 
and less beautiful forms. Nor may we violate 
it with impunity, barbarians as we are : — Na- 
ture cries out against our performing this act 
with one whom we dislike or mistrust, or even 
toward whom we are indifferent. In a word, 
I had rather make love to a woman who affects 
me with a physical repulsion than dine with 
a man I don't like. The fact proves the perfect 
sympathy existing between our physical and 
psychic selves, and from this dual voice there 
is no appeal — it is the highest court of human 
nature. 

This was the very thought in my mind when, 
raising the second glass of Bordeaux to my 
lips, I saw him . . . and set it down untasted. 

He came into the room at the farthest en- 
trance leading direct to the street, and shoul- 
dered his way through the crowd of guests and 
waiters in his old big careless manner, which 
never failed to move the admiration of women 
and the resentment of men. He was dressed 
as I had so often seen him, not in regulation 
evening clothes, but in a suit of some rich gray 
material which he wore as if it were a part of 
him, with a light overcoat tossed over his 
arm : — it was in the early days of April. 



io8 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

The shouldering gray-suited giant, picked 
out in strong relief from all the black-clad 
guests, came straight toward me lacross the 
crowded room, his fine head, crowned with 
auburn curls, held solidly erect on a columnar 
neck; the smiling, eager challenge of his eye 
bent upon me. 

What I thought God alone knows, if indeed 
I was not deprived of all conscious power of 
thinking in that terrible moment. And yet, 
obedient to old habit, I tried to rise from my 
chair to greet him, but found myself utterly 
paralyzed. Neither hand nor foot could I 
move. 

But though my body was stricken lifeless by 
the presence of the Supernatural, my soul, 
strange to say, remained calm and without ter- 
ror. And great as was the physical shock of 
the fear which held me now as in a. vise, I yet 
wondered that our neighbors, almost elbowing 
us, seemed to pay no attention either to him or 
to me. . . . 

"Don't get up, old fellow; you^re a bit 
shaken. I'll just sit here, if you don't mind, 
and have a taste of your dinner and a sip of 
your Chateau Palmer — you always did like the 
red." 



IN THE RED ROOM 109 

His voice ! — the same genial tones in it that 
had ever such power to thrill me. Oh! I 
could believe it all a dream, an hallucina- 
tion arising from some disorder of the senses, 
were it not for that voice whose tones are 
registered in my heart. In obedience to a nod 
from me, — for I could not have spoken had 
my life depended on it, — the waiter, without 
the least apparent show of concern, laid an- 
other plate. From his manner I could not 
divine if he were conscious of the presence of 
my Guest. 

Ah! then I knew it was indeed my friend 
over whose untimely grave the grass had with- 
ered and the winds had blown during four long 
years. For in the old loving big-brotherly way, 
he began to play the host as of yore, to heap 
my plate with good things, and to fill my glass 
with cheerful assiduity. "I'm afraid you must 
often go hungry without me to help you, old 
boy", he said, with the old kind smile. 

Still, I could not speak, but at his bidding 
I ate my share of the dinner. He too partook, 
though lightly, and soon we had made an end 
of it. Then the waiter having cleared the 
table and served the coffee, he offered me a 



no AN ATTIC DREAMER 

cigarette from a full box — his old favorite 
brand, I noticed — and lit one himself. 

I watched him mutely, with emotions which 
I may not describe — perhaps rather with a 
tense suspension of all emotion, save that of a 
fearful expectancy. 

He spoke : "You thought of me so lovingly 
and insistently to-night, in this place where we 
have often been happy together, that I had to 
come to you. Love is the one thing, you see, 
that has power to recall us from the Shadow." 

He paused, and the flute-like laughter of 
women rose high above the surrounding hum 
of talk and the surded strains of the orchestra. 
There came into his eye a light I well knew. 

Nodding his head whence the laughter had 
proceeded, he went on: 

"The keenest part of your regret for me, my 
friend, is that I who loved that so much should 
have had to die in the flower of my youth." . . . 

Even as he spoke my mind like lightning 
overran his brief career. I saw him as he was 
when he came from the rugged North to the 
Big Town, a young giant in his health and 
strength, and in his eager appetite for pleasure. 
I marked in him that terrible passion for 
wom^en to which so many splendid and gener- 



IN THE RED ROOM in 

ous natures are sacrificed; that craving for ac- 
tion and excitement which eats the sword in 
the scabbard; that tiger thirst for* the en- 
chanted Goblet of Life which would drain all 
to the dregs at a single draught; that devouring 
energy which knows no rest but with daring 
hand would tear aside the curtain betwixt day 
and day. 

He went on as if I had spoken my thoughts 
aloud: "Yes, there is nothing of all this about 
us but I have had, my boy, and good measure — 
as you were thinking. Life owes me nothing, 
even though I did close my account at thirty; 
I lived every minute of my time — got all there 
was coming to me or to any man. No regrets I 
If I could come back for keeps I would not live 
otherwise, do otherwise, than I have lived and 
done. Excepting, perhaps, that I would not 
make such a hurried job of it. Yes, that was 
my mistake, but you are not to pity me on this 
account. For what matter a few years more 
or less, a few dinners more or less — aye, a few 
passions, more or less, the best and only per- 
manently alluring pleasure that life can offer? 
The end is the same, and the end comes as 
surely to him who has outlived his digestion and 
his capacity for enjoyment as to him who, like 



112 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

me, dies with every power and every appetite 
at the full." 

For a moment I took my eyes from my Guest 
and looked anxiously about to assure myself 
that nobody was listening to this confession of 
the Dead. As before, we seemed not to attract 
any special attention. Our nearest neighbors, 
a man and a young woman a little the worse for 
wine, hardly deigned us a glance, and were cer- 
tainly occupied with anything but spiritual af- 
fairs. This bit of the universal human comedy 
was repeated here and there about the room. 
Many diners had gone, and with each depar- 
ture the scattered lovers seemed to take on 
fresh courage and confidence. The orchestra 
continued to play intermittently and was ap- 
plauded ever the more wildly by the still linger- 
ing guests. 

All this I saw in the space of less than a sec- 
ond or two during which my eyes had left his 
face. 

He continued: "You have grieved too much, 
dear old boy, over the thought that I was 
cheated, or cheated myself of my due share of 
life. The cowards who dared not live, the 
weaklings whose fill of life was starvation and 
death to me, found a text and a moral in my 



IN THE RED ROOM 113 

fate. Let not this be your thought, my friend, 
when you sit here alone in the Red Room and 
pledge me in old Bordeaux. Think rather that 
I fulfilled my life, won every prize of my desire, 
tasted every joy, scorned every fear, and died 
in the flush of victory!" . . . 

As he said these last words his voice sounded 
like the distant note of a silver clarion. Could 
it be possible that he was unheard by the neigh- 
boring diners? Again I stole a fearful glance 
about the room. 

Evidently nobody was concerned with us in 
the now thinned-out company. The hour was 
late. Leaning against the wall, at a little dis- 
tance, was our waiter, quietly observant of us, 
as I thought, but not importui;ate with his at- 
tentions. 

With a feeling of relief I turned again to 
my Visitor. He was gone! — but for some mo- 
ments my bewilderment and stupefaction were 
such that I could not remove my eyes from the 
vacant chair where he had been seated an in- 
stant before. 

I must have cried out, recovering my speech, 
for I awoke as from a trance to see that some 
near-by people were looking toward me in a 



114 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

surprised fashion. In the same moment the 
waiter came hastily forward. 

"Did Monsieur call? Is anything the mat- 
ter with Monsieur?" 

"No, no," I managed to articulate, my pres- 
ence of mind returning at sight of those staring 
faces; "what should be the matter? Just bring 
me a pony of brandy — and the bill." 

He was back in a moment with the liquor, 
and having figured out the bill, laid it face down 
on the table before me. 

I tossed off the brandy, thinking that I had 
just had the strangest hallucination that ever 
sprang from a few glasses of old Bordeaux, 
and unable to account for it upon any theory 
of my previous experience, or temperament, or 
constitution. 

Then I took up the dinner check and, sur- 
prised at the amount, called the waiter. 

"Haven't you made a mistake?" I asked, 
indicating the charge. 

"But . . . pardon! — the other gentleman. 
Monsieur is paying for two," said the waiter. 



VI 

SAINT MARK * 

RE-ENTER the Sieur de Conte ! . . . 
Our gallant old friend makes as 
knightly a show as of yore when first 
he rode into the lists and pledged his fealty 
to the stainless Maid. But alas! his hair that 
rivalled the rutilant mane of Mars, is now 
white as carded wool. Yet has that eye lost 
nothing of its old fire, and the years have but 
fetched new strength and cunning to his hand. 
And methinks the Sieur fights with a tempered 
skill and a wary shrewdness that were not al- 
ways his in the old days — by my halidom, I 
would not care to be the Holy Council at Rome 
with such a champion pitted against me 1 For 
indeed the Holy Council may pow-wow as long 
or as short as may please their holinesses — the 

♦This essay was written before the Beatification of the 
Maid (Beatification is not Canonization), but the fact does 
not necessarily call for any change in what I have written. 
See also the article on "The Maid" in the Author's "New 
Adventures." 

115 



ii6 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

world at the challenge of the Sleur de Conte, 
has awarded the crown of saintship to Joan of 
Arc. The living voice, the magic pen of the 
Sieur de Conte are worth all their musty raking 
from the past; are more than worth their as- 
sumed authority to decide the question. If the 
Holy Fathers have dropped the matter for the 
nonce, as rumor now declares, they have but 
done the thing that might have been expected 
of them. The Church is ever too wise to in- 
vite defeat, too polite to issue a dead-letter, 
too strong in its divine right to surrender on 
heretic compulsion. Besides, it is here to stay 
forever; and shall it be moved for a chit of a 
girl who has been dead less than five hundred 
years? — Tut, tut, — there is always plenty of 
time ! 

The Sieur de Conte (otherwise Mark 
Twain) in all that he has written on the sub- 
ject, has failed to point out one extraordinary 
fact with regard to Joan of Arc. I am glad 
that he has left it to me. It is this : Since that 
fearful day in Rouen when she was led to her 
martyrdom by fire, she has been the glory of 
the faith and the shame of the Church. That 
is why she has waited so long for the formal 
warrant of saintship. That is why the Devil's 



SAINT MARK 117 

Advocate has so far prevailed to deny her on 
earth the crown she wears in Heaven.* 

Do not think this a musty old question which 
interests only a few droning priests sitting in a 
back room of the Vatican, and here and there 
a poetic idealist like the Sieur de Conte. By no 
means ! — it is a question as vital as the fame 
of the Maid herself, calling forth champions 
and antagonists in every age. It is a plague- 
sore in the side of the Church — put your finger 
there ! It never has been settled because it 
never could and never can be settled to the 
credit of the Church. Also I believe it is bound 
up with the eternal question of liberty, in whose 
holy cause the Maid fought and suffered. 

Joan of Arc was done to death by the priests 
and theologians of the day, urged on by the 
civil power in the hands of her French and 
English enemies. I am aware that her death is 
not chargeable, in a direct sense, to the Church, 
and it is deemed likely by Lamartine that she 
would have been saved, had she known enough 
to appeal directly to Rome. I am aware that, 
short of canonization, the Church has done 
what it could to make amends to the memory 
of Joan of Arc. To give her the crown of 

* Joan was canonized in May, 1920. 



ii8 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

salntship now, would not restore the credit of 
the Church, but would rather irreparably dam- 
age it in the eyes of the world. For the two 
or three hundred priests and theologians who 
judged the Maid, as well as the godly men of 
the Inquisition of Paris who damned her as a 
child of the Devil, were in loyal communion 
with the Church, and were, in fact, part of its 
machinery. Still, it is certain that the Church, 
in its true representative and executive charac- 
ter,* did not incur the guilt and odium of 
Joan's death. But the whole system arrogat- 
ing divine powers and claiming the right to 
draw supernatural warrants, was involved in 
the trial and murder of the Maid; was judged 
by the measure with which it meted to her; 
and is now of a truth dead forever to the more 
enlightened part of mankind. The blood of 
the martyrs is the seed of liberty ! 

A certain set of apologists on behalf of the 
Church try to cast all the blame of Joan's per- 
secution and death upon the EngHsh. To be 
sure, the English had the best right to hate her 
and to seek her destruction, for had she not 
beaten them in many battles and all but driven 
them out of the fair land of France, which 

* I.e., the central authority at Rome. 



SAINT MARK 119 

they had come to regard as their own? But 
let us be fair; her own countrymen shared to 
the full in the guilt and the shame of her death 
— nothing can clear them of that! Besides, 
we are not to forget that both French and 
English were in that day of the same religious 
faith. Not a single heretic took part in the 
proceedings against Joan, from the holy clerics 
of the Inquisition of Paris who pronounced 
anathema upon her, to Bishop Cauchon, that 
zealous prototype of Fouquier Tinville, who 
sought her blood openly and thirsted for it with 
an eager relish that shocked even his fellow 
judges; or the rude soldiers who kept guard 
within her cell day and night, and probably 
caused her as much anguish, at times, as the 
threat of the fire. They were all believers in 
the One True Faith, and the stain of her inno- 
cent blood is upon every one of them, French 
and English. Make no mistake about that! 

Indeed, we can not go astray as to the facts, 
and these themselves can not be twisted to the 
purpose of special pleading; for the whole plan 
of the murder of Joan of Arc, the carefully 
marked steps by which it was unrelentingly 
carried out, the heroic but ineffectual struggles 
of the victim, the unspeakable devices resorted 



I20 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

to, in order to circumvent and destroy her, the 
pitiless, unhalting purpose of her prosecutors, 
marked as with a pencil of red, — are laid bare 
to us, by the sworn testimony of eye-witnesses, 
with a fulness of detail and a veracity of state- 
ment which leave hardly a question to be asked 
or a doubt to be solved. It is all there — the 
conspiracy of power, learning and holiness 
(God save the mark!) against one brave, help- 
less, ignorant, innocent girl. We see the 
suavely ferocious Cauchon pressing her with 
both his holy hands toward the scaffold — he 
was excommunicated some years afterward, but 
it didn't save the Church's credit. We see that 
formidable array of priests setting the utmost 
skill of their wits, the deepest resources of their 
cunning, against a simple country girl who 
could neither read nor write a name which is 
now one of the best known on the earth; try- 
ing by every art of casuistry to wrest or sur- 
prise from her an admission that should send 
her to the flames. 

Let us be just: they were not all equally 
guilty, not all equally intent on the slaughter 
of the innocent lamb before them. Not one 
was so bad as the monster Cauchon, and to be 
strictly fair even to that consecrated beast, not 



SAINT MARK i2i 

one had Cauchon's motive — but the fact does 
not save the Church's credit. Some of those 
priests had kind hearts and would gladly have 
sent the child home to her mother; but they 
lacked the power. Besides, they were cap- 
tives themselves, bound hand and foot with the 
fetters of superstition and devil-born lunacy, 
misnamed religious fervor; daunted by mon- 
strous ignorance, and mythic fears of Hell and 
darkness, chrisomed and holy-watered into a 
pretence of light and knowledge — aye, they 
were cowering slaves, branded and obedient to 
the lash, and she standing free and enfran- 
chised in her chains ! 

Though I am perhaps the first to call atten- 
tion to the matter, there are many points of 
likeness between the trial of Jesus Christ and 
the trial of Joan of Arc. They were both sold 
for a price of silver. Both were martyrs of 
liberty. Both perished through a combination 
of forces political and priestly. Christ had 
Caiaphas; Joan had Cauchon, something the 
worst of it. The chief accusers, the head 
prosecutors of each were priests, and as the 
Jews cried out at the trial of Jesus, "His blood 
be upon us and upon our children!" — so might 
the priests have cried out at the condemnation 



122 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

of Joan, "Her blood be upon us and upon the 
Church 1" It is there yet — the excommunica- 
tion of Cauchon and the reversal of the Judg- 
ment have not removed it. Something more 
will have to be done ere that Great Wrong can 
be righted. 

But having shown the great similarity mark- 
ing the trials of Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, 
I now wish to call attention to a most striking 
point of unlikeness, which is even more sug- 
gestive than the resemblance shown. It is this : 
among the judges of Joan of Arc — priests as 
they were or deemed themselves to be, of the 
Christ of love and mercy — there was none so 
merciful as Pontius Pilate, whose memory is 
not held in much honor by the Christian world; 
not one had the courage or the humanity to 
wash his hands of the intended murder. Some 
desired it out of their blind ignorance and cruel 
fanaticism; many no doubt regretted it, as a 
severe but salutary act of faith; all consented 
to it I The responsibility is thus landed 
squarely where it belongs, on the official reli- 
gion which was then in league with the secular 
arm. If there had been the least available 
doubt as to that — if the damning record were 
not in black and white, attested by the solemn 



SAINT MARK 123 

oaths of so many witnesses of or participants in 
the trial — the Church would long ago, for her 
own credit, have granted the saintship of Joan 
of Arc, and to-day the altars of the Maid of 
Orleans would flame in a hundred lands. But 
perhaps, since the Eternal Church does not 
count years as men count them, it is yet some 
ages too soon to raise an altar to the Second 
Great Martyr of Liberty. And maybe this is 
a fortunate thing for Liberty and the Maid, 
for on the day that the Church makes Joan of 
Arc wholly her own, on that day she will step 
down from the unexampled place she has so 
long held in the love and pity and worship of 
mankind.* Such a consummation would not, I 
am sure, be agreeable to her leal knight and 
devoted champion, the Sieur de Conte Mark 
Twain. 



IN the wide court of Heaven, on any of these 
fine days, you may see — if God has given 
you sight above your eyes — a Maid who has 
been a maiden now during full five hundred 

* It would be a nice question to decide how much of the 
world-wide sentiment of aflFection and veneration for Joan 
is due to the fact that she has always been regarded as a 
victim of the Church. 



124 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

years. Her hair is the color of the corn-silk 
at harvest-time, and her eyes of the early 
for-get-me-not. She is slender as of old when, 
clad in shining armor and mounted on her milk- 
white steed, she led the long dispirited war- 
riors of France to victory, or upheld her won- 
drous standard at the coronation of her King. 
Often she may be seen leaning over the crystal 
battlements, chin on hand and looking down 
with pensive gaze on France, and Orleans, and 
Domremy, and Rouen whence her soul, like a 
white dove, ascended in the flame of her coun- 
try's cruel ingratitude. 

But sometimes she turns her glance from 
scenes like these, charged with sweet and ter- 
rible memories, and looks down with loving 
intentness toward a certain spot on earth where 
an old white-haired man raises eyes of love and 
almost worship to hers. They see and salute 
each other — oh, be sure of that ! The old man 
was many years younger when they first he-. 
came acquainted, but the Maid is always the 
same age, for they grow no older in Heaven. 
Who shall explain the spell (since the Sieur de 
Conte will not confess his dreams) that has 
joined in a perfect love and understanding these 
two children of Nature, separated by the dif- 



SAINT MARK 125 

ference of race and the shoreless gulf of five 
hundred years? Who can but wonder at the 
enchanting touch of a white hand from out the 
past which has turned the bold scoffer and 
jeerer, the wild man of the river and the mining 
camps, into such a knight as was rarely seen 
in the most gracious days of chivalry? And to 
see him now, when he should be taking the rest 
he has so gloriously earned, still eager to bat- 
tle in her cause, daring the world to the onset, 
fighting for her with the passionate heart of 
youth, pleading for her with a burning zeal, as 
if in the five centuries that have rolled away 
since her death no other cause worthy to be 
named with hers has appealed to the award 
of sword or pen — to see this rightly and with 
eyes cleared for the perception of that Truth 
which is the only thing really precious in the 
world, is to rejoice at the finest spectacle that 
has been given to the wondering eyes of men 
in our day. 

Whether the brave old knight will yet win 
the whole world over to her side, I can not 
say, though I think he will, if he be given time 
enough; but, at any rate, he has already made 
sure of all kind and feeling hearts. I believe 
his devotion to Joan of Arc is the finest and 



126 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

most ideal poem of our age — an age, to be sure, 
which has known too little poetry, and which 
has never thought of looking to the Sieur de 
Conte to supply it. And I believe, further, 
that the Book of the Ideal contains the story 
of no love more pure and beautiful than this 
which unites the Old Man and the Maid.* 

*This essay (entitled "Saint Mark") was first published 
in the Papyrus in 1904, and drew from our glorious Mark 
Twain the following: 

"It is strong and eloquent and beautiful. The inspiration 
which tipped your pen with fire is from the Maid. After all 
these centuries that force still lives — lives and grows, I 
think. 

"I was struck by a remark of yours (and I agree with it) 
that from the day of the martyrdom the Maid has been the 
'glory of the faith and the shame of the Church.' 

"I was hoping she would never be canonized. One doesn't 
build monuments to Adam: he is a monument himself." 



VII 

THE poet's atonement 

IT HARDLY seems a decade since the dis- 
grace, the trial and sentence of Oscar 
Wilde. His death followed so close upon 
his punishment as to give the deepest tragic 
value to the lesson of his fall. There was in 
truth nothing left him to do but die, after he 
had penned the most poignantly pathetic poem 
and the most strangely moving confession 
(which is yet a subtle vindication) that have 
been given to the world since the noon of 
Byron's fame. 

Until the present hour * the world has with- 
held its pity from that tragedy, as complete in 
all its features as the Greek conscience would 
have exacted, — and Oscar Wilde has stood be- 
yond the pale of human sympathy. Only 
seemed to stand, however, for there are many 
signs of the reaction, the better judgment which 
never delays long behind the severest condem- 

* First published about 1906. 
127 



128 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

nation of the public voice when, as in this case, 
the circumstances justify an appeal to the 
higher mercy and humanity. 

Socially, Oscar Wilde was executed, and for 
a brief time it seemed as if his name would 
stand only in the calendar of the infamous. 
But men presently remembered that he was a 
genius, a literary artist of almost unique dis- 
tinction among English writers, a wit whose 
talent for paradox and delicately perverse 
fancy had yielded the world a pure treasure 
of delight. In the first hue-and-cry of his dis- 
grace, the British public — and to a large extent, 
the American public also — had taken up moral 
cudgels not merely against the man himself, 
but against the writer. His plays were with- 
drawn from the theatres, his writings from 
the hbraries and bookstalls, and his name was 
anathema wherever British respectability wields 
its leaden mace. But though you can pass sen- 
tence of social death upon a man, you can not 
execute a Book! You can not lay your hang- 
man's hands upon an Idea, and all the edicts of 
Philistinism are powerless against it. For true 
genius is the rarest and most precious thing in 
the world, and God has wisely ordained that 
the malice or stupidity of men shall not destroy 



THE POET'S ATONEMENT 129 

It. And this the world sees to be just, when it 
has had time to weigh the matter, as in the 
present instance. 

Oscar Wilde went to his prison with the 
burden of such shame and reprobation as has 
never been laid upon a literary man of equal 
eminence. Not a voice was raised for him — 
the starkness of his guilt silenced even his 
closest friends and warmest admirers. The 
world at large approved of his punishment. 
That small portion of the world which is loth 
to see the suffering of any sinner, was revolted 
by the nature of his offence and turned away 
without a word; the sin of Oscar Wilde claimed 
no charity and permitted of no discussion. Had 
his crime been murder itself, his fame and 
genius would have raised up defenders on every 
hand. As it was, all mouths were stopped, and 
the man went broken-hearted to his doom. 

But while his body lay in prison, the children 
of his mind pleaded for him, and such is the 
invincible appeal of genius, the heart of the 
world began to be troubled in despite of itself. 
His books came slowly forth from their hiding- 
places; his name was restored here and there 
to a catalogue; a little emotion of pity was 
awakened in his favor. Then from his prison 



I30 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

cell arose a cry of soul-anguish, of utter pa- 
thos, of supreme expiation, which stirred the 
heart of pity to its depths. The feigner was 
at last believed when the world had made sure 
of the accents of his agony and could put its 
finger in each of his wounds. Society had sen- 
tenced this poet: the poet both sentenced and 
forgave society, in "The Ballad of Reading 
Gaol", thus achieving the most original para- 
dox of his fantastic genius and throwing about 
his shame something of the halo of martyrdom. 
He did more than this, in the judgment of his 
fellow artists — he purchased his redemption 
and snatched his name from the mire of infamy 
into which it had been cast. Strange how the 
world applauded the triumphant genius which 
only a little while before it had condemned to 
ignominy and silence I 

II 

THE utter and incredible completeness of 
Wilde's disgrace satisfies the artistic 
sense, which is never content with half-results. 
We know that it afforded this kind of satisfac- 
tion to the victim himself, exigent of artistic 
effects even in his catastrophe — and the proof 
of it is "De Profundis". This book will take 



THE POET'S ATONEMENT 131 

rank with the really memorable human docu- 
ments. It is a true cry of the heart, a sincere 
utterance of the spiritual depths of this man's 
nature, when the angels of sorrow had troubled 
the pool. The only thing that seems to militate 
against its acceptance as such, is the unfailing 
presence of that consummate literary art, too 
conscious of itself, which, as in all the author's 
work save "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", 
draws us constantly from the substance to the 
form. Many persons of critical acumen say 
they can not see the penitent for the artist. 
The texture of the sackcloth is too exquisitely 
wrought and too manifestly of the loom that 
gave us "Dorian Gray", "Salome", and the 
rest. How could a man stricken unto death 
with grief and shame so occupy himself with 
the vanity of style, — a dilettante even in the 
hour when fate was crushing him with its 
heaviest blows? Does not this wonderful 
piece of work, lambent with all the rays of his 
lawless genius, show the artificial core of the 
man as nothing that even he ever did before? 
And what is the spiritual value of a "confes- 
sion" which is so obviously a literary tour de 
force; in which the plain and the simple are 



132 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

avoided with the "precious", lapidary art of a 
prince of decadents? 

So say, or seem to say, the critics. For my- 
self, I can accept as authentic Wilde's testament 
of sorrow, even though it be written in a style 
which often dazzles with beauty, surprises with 
paradox, and sometimes intoxicates with the 
rapture of the inevitable artist. He could not 
teach his hand to unlearn its cunning, strive as 
he might. Like Narcissus wondering at his 
own beauty in the fountain, no sooner had he 
begun to tell the tale of his sorrow than the 
loveliness of his words seized upon him, and 
the sorrow that found such expression seemed 
a thing almost to be desired. 

So when Oscar Wilde took up the pen in his 
prison solitude to make men weep, he did that 
indeed, but too soon he delighted them as of 
yore. Art, his adored mistress, whispered her 
thrilling consolations to the poor castaway — 
they had taken all from him — liberty, honor, 
wealth, fame, mother, wife, children, and shut 
him up in an iron hell, but by God ! they should 
not take her! With this little pen in hand they 
were all under his feet, — solemn judge, stolid 
jury, the beast of many heads, and the whited 
British Philistia. Let them come on now! — 



THE POET'S ATONEMENT 133 

But soft, the poet's anger is gone In a moment, 
for Beauty, faithful to one who had loved her 
t'other side o' madness, comes and fills his 
narrow cell with her adorable presence, bring- 
ing the glory of the sweet world he has lost, — 
the breath of dawn, the scented hush of sum- 
mer nights, the peace of April rains, the pag- 
eant of the Autumn lands, the changeful won- 
der of the sea. Imagination brushes away his 
bounds of stone and steel to give him all her 
largess of the past; gracious figures of poesy 
and romance known and loved from his sinless 
youth (the man is always an artist, but you see I 
he can weep) ; the elect company of classic ages 
to whom his soul does reverence and who seem 
not to scorn him ; the fair heroines of immortal 
story who in the old days, as his dreams so 
often told him, had deemed him worthy of 
their love — he would kneel at their white feet 
now, but their sweet glances carry no rebuke; 
the kind poets, his beloved masters in Apollo, 
who bend upon him no alienated gaze; the he- 
roes, the sages who had inspired his boyish 
heart, the sceptred and mighty sons of genius 
who had roused in him a passion for fame — all 
come thronging at the summons of memory and 
fancy — a far dearer and better world than that 



134 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

which had denied, cursed and condemned him, 
and which he was to know no more. 

Then, last of all, when these fair and noble 
guests were gone, and the glow of their visita- 
tion had died out into the old bitter loneliness 
and sorrow, there came One whose smile had 
the brightness of the sun and the seven stars. 
And the poor prisoner of sin cast himself down 
at the feet of the Presence, as unworthy to 
look upon that divine radiancy, and the foun- 
tains of his heart were broken up as never be- 
fore. Yet in his weeping he heard a Voice 
which said, "Thy sin and sorrow are equal, and 
thou hast still but a little way to go. Come !" 

Then rose up the sinner and fared forth of 
the spirit with Christ to -2mmaus. . . . 

And men will yet say that the words which 
the sinner wrote of that Vision have saved his 
soul (which not long thereafter was demanded 
of him) and sweetened his fame forever. But 
the critics who forget the adjuration, "Judge 
not lest ye be judged", cry out that the sinner 
is never to be trusted in these matters, because 
he writes so well ! God, however, is kinder 
than men or critics. He will forgive the poor 
poet, in spite of his beautiful style. 



VIII 

CHILDREN OF THE AGE 

I HAVE been reading the "Last Letters of 
Aubrey Beardsley". A strange book, full 
of a sort of macabre interest. Not really 
a book, and yet peculiarly suggestive as an end- 
of-the-century document. The soul of Beards- 
ley here exposed with a kind of abnormal 
frankness that somehow recalls the very style 
of art by which he shocked and captured the 
world's regard. And the obvious purpose of it 
all, to show how he attained peace of the spirit 
and a quiet grave in his early manhood. 

Poor Beardsley was bitten deep with the 
malady of his age — he ranks with the most in- 
teresting, though not, of course, the greatest 
of its victims. . He died under thirty, and his 
name is known to thousands who know nothing 
of his art nor perhaps of any art whatever. 
To very many his name stands as a symbol of 
degeneracy. There is an intimate legend which 
attaints him with the scarlet sins of the newer 
135 



136 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

hedonism. He is closely associated in the pub- 
lic mind with the most tragically disgraced 
literary man of modern times. In art he was 
a lawless genius, but a genius for all that, else 
the world would not have heard so much of 
him. The fact that counts is, that in a very 
brief life he did much striking work, and for a 
time, at least, gave his name to a school of 
imitators. Whether his artistic influence was 
for good or evil, does not matter in this view 
of him — let the professors haggle about that. 
What does matter is the fact and sum of his 
accomplishment, which justifies the continued 
interest in his name. 

One naturally associates with Beardsley 
other ill-fated victims of the age, such as Mau- 
passant, Bastien Lepage, Marie BashkirtsefF, 
Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, — to cite no 
more. They were all martyrs of their own 
talent, and martyrs also of that ravaging 
malady of the heart, that devouring casuistry, 
so peculiar to the last quarter of the Nineteenth 
century. We may be sure the disease was not 
confined to a few persons of extraordinary 
talent — of them we heard only because of their 
position in the public mind, and also because, 
as artists, they were bound to reveal their suf- 



CHILDREN OF THE AGE 137 

ferings. Nay, we were the more keenly inter- 
ested in their painful confessions, knowing that 
they spoke for many condemned to bear their 
agonies in silence. For the world will soon 
turn away from an isolated sufferer, as from a 
freak on the operating table — let it fear or 
recognize the disease for its own and it will 
never weary of seeing and hearing. This 
commonplace truth explains, I think, the great 
and continuing interest which the persons above 
named have excited. 

All of these were unusually gifted, whether 
as artists or writers, and all strove to fulfill 
their talents with an almost suicidal fury of ap- 
plication. It seemed as if each had a prescience 
of early death and labored with fatal devotion 
that the world might not lose the fruit which 
was his to give. Generous sacrifice, which 
never fails to mark the rarest type of genius. 
Maupassant, perhaps the most gifted, the most 
terribly in earnest of all, went to work like a 
demoniac, pouring forth a whole literature of 
plays, poems, stories, romances, all in the space 
of ten years. Such fecundity, coupled with an 
artistic practice so admirable and a literary 
conscience so exacting, was perhaps never be- 
fore witnessed in the same writer. But the 



138 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

world presently learned a greater wonder still 
— that this unwearied artist had, in those ten 
years of apparently unremitting labor, lived a 
life that was not less full of romance, of pas- 
sion, of variety and excitement than the crea- 
tions of his brain. He had accomplished, as it 
were, a twofold suicide — in life and in art. 

Maupassant died mad, his brain worn out 
by constant production, his heart torn by the 
malady of his age, which we can trace in so 
many pages of his work. But at least he died 
without disgrace, and in this respect his fate 
was far happier than that of Oscar Wilde, his 
contemporary and equal in genius, whose bril- 
liant career closed in the darkest infamy. Poor 
Wilde sinned greatly no doubt, — the English 
courts settled that, — though his atonement was 
of a piece with his offending. The man dies, 
but the artist lives ; and Wilde has work to his 
credit which will long survive the memory of 
his tragic shame. 

In his last wretched days Wilde turned for 
consolation to the Catholic Church, which, with 
a deeper knowledge of human nature than her 
rivals can understand, still makes the worst sin- 
ner, if repentant, her peculiar care. Wilde be- 
came a Catholic, and he recorded that had he 



CHILDREN OF THE AGE 139 

but done so years before, the world would not 
have been shocked by the story of his disgrace. 
This is less a truism than a confession. At 
any rate, one is not sorry to know that the 
poor, broken-hearted wretch found sanctuary 
at the last, and died in that divine hope which 
he has voiced in the noblest of his poems. 

Like Wilde, Beardsley became a Catholic at 
the last when he was under sentence of death 
from consumption, and the "Letters" are ad- 
dressed to a worthy Catholic priest who in- 
structed him in the faith. Beardsley was of 
versatile talents, but he could not fairly be 
called a writer, and these letters were obviously 
written in perfect candor and with no thought 
of their ever meeting any eyes save the good 
priest's for which they were intended. All the 
same they are, as I have already said, curiously 
interesting, and they do not lack touches of 
genuine insight and emotion. The fantastic 
artist grew very sober in the shadow of death, 
and the riot of sensuality in which his genius 
had formerly delighted, was clean wiped from 
his brain. Wilde himself, in his last days of 
grace, might have penned this sentence : 

"If Heine is the great warning, Pascal is the 
great example to all artists and thinkers. He 



140 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

understood that to become a Christian the man 
of letters must sacrifice his gifts, just as Mag- 
dalen sacrificed her beauty." 

Strange language this, from an end-of-the- 
century decadent, whose achievement in art was 
that he had carried to an extreme the sug- 
gestions of the wildest sensualism. But per- 
haps it was not the same Beardsley who made 
the pictures to "Salome" and who, through the 
most original, creative part of his career, 
worked like a man in the frenzy of satyriasis. 
No, it was not the same Beardsley — the sen- 
tence of premature death had turned Pan into 
a St. Anthony. 

Not long after penning the words I have 
quoted, Beardsley made a sacrifice of his gifts 
and was received into the Catholic Church. 
Within a year thereafter he died. There is 
nothing to mar the moral of his conversion and 
edifying change of heart, except the reflection 
that, like so many other eleventh-hour peni- 
tents, he put off making a sacrifice of his gifts 
until he had no further use for them. And at 
last, one can't help thinking that if Beardsley 
had not made some fearfully immoral pictures, 
this book, with the highly moral story of his 



CHILDREN OF THE AGE 141 

conversion, would not have been put before the 
world. ... 

I have mentioned Ernest Dowson, a minor 
poet, the singer of a few exquisite songs. Less 
talented than the others, yet a true child of the 
age and stricken at the heart with the same 
malady, Dowson owes his fame more to the 
memorial written by his friend and brother 
poet, Arthur Symons, than to his own work, 
which in bulk is of the slightest. His short 
life was frightfully dissolute — Symons speaks 
of his drunkenness with a kind of awe. It was 
not an occasional over-indulgence with com- 
rades of his own stamp, passing the bottle too 
often while their heads grew hot and their 
tongues loosened; it was not the solitary, sod- 
den boozing to which many hopeless drunkards 
are addicted. For weeks at a stretch Dowson 
would give himself up to a debauch with the 
refuse of the London slums, and during that 
time he would seem an utterly different being, 
with scarcely a hint of his normal self. I wish 
some one would explain how this brutal sot- 
tishness can co-exist with the most delicate in- 
tellectual sensibility, with the poet-soul. We 
have had many explanations of the puzzle, and 
they have only one fault — they do not explain. 



142 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Dowson left us little, not because he drank 
much, but because he could rarely satisfy his 
own taste, which kept him as unhappy in a 
literary sense as his conscience did in a religious 
one. He wrote some fine sonnets to a young 
woman whose mother kept a cheap eating- 
house: — she married the waiter. The genius 
of Beardsley could alone have done justice to 
this grotesque anti-climax. 

Like Beardsley, Dowson died a Catholic — 
he had barely passed thirty — but unlike 
Beardsley, he had expected to do so all his 
life, for he was born in the faith. Yet the 
faith had not saved him from le mat du Steele, 
nor had it kept him from the foul pit of de- 
bauchery. What it did — and this was much — 
was to give him a hope at the end. . . . 

Oh, sad children of the age, why wait so long 
before coming to your Mother, the ancient 
Church? She alone can heal your cruel 
wounds, self-inflicted, and bind up your bleed- 
ing hearts. She alone can succor you; she alone 
can give your troubled spirit rest and quiet 
those restless brains that would be asking, ask- 
ing unto madness. See ! — she has balsam and 
wine for your wayfaring in this world, and 



CHILDREN OF THE AGE 143 

something that will fortify you for a longer 
journey. Hear ye the bells calling the happy 
faithful who have never known the hell of 
doubt; hear ye the organ pealing forth its jubi- 
lation over the Eternal Sacrifice! Come into 
the great House of God, founded in the faith, 
strong with the strength, sanctified by the 
prayer, and warm with the hope of nineteen 
hundred years. Come, make here at the altar 
a sacrifice of your poor human gifts, and ex- 
change them for undying treasures. Painter, 
for your bits of canvas, the glories of heaven; 
poet, for your best rhyme the songs of the 
saved. Come, though it be not until the last 
hour — yet come, come, even then! . . , 

Whether the old Church can really give 
what she promises, I know not, but sure am I 
that men will go on believing to the end. For 
faith is ever more attractive than unfaith, and 
human nature craves a comfortable heaven; 
and, after all, it takes more courage to die in 
the new scientific theory of things than in the 
simple belief of the saints. And alas ! the cold 
affirmations of science can not cure nor genius 
itself satisfy the stricken children of the age. 



IX 

THE BLACK FRIAR 

Beware! beware! of the Black Friar 

Who sitteth by Norman stone, 
For he mutters his prayer in the midnight air, 

And his mass of the days that are gone. 
* * * 

And whether for good or whether for ill 

It is not mine to say, 
But still to the house of Amundeville 

He abideth night and day. 

— Don Juan 

ONE may wonder what my Lord Byron 
in the shades thinks of his noble 
grandson's performance in summon- 
ing the obscene Furies to a final desecration of 
his grave. Surely the ghouls of scandal that 
find their congenial food in the shrouds of the 
illustrious dead, have never had richer quarry. 
True, they have already had their noses at the 
scent (through the sweet oflices of an Ameri- 
can authoress),* and have even picked a little 

* Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book "Lady Byron Vindi- 
cated" made so great a sensation nearly fifty years ago, and 
is now all but forgotten. Mrs. Stowe's posthumous hanging 
144 



THE BLACK FRIAR 145 

at the carrion; but the full body-of -death was 
never before deUvered to them. 

This point has been clouded over in the pub- 
lic discussion of the infamy. It should be made 
clear in order that the Earl of Lovelace may 
receive his due credit. Mrs. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe's revelations were, of course, to the 
same purport, but they were based on the un- 
supported word of Lady Byron and some very 
free readings of certain passages in the poet's 
works. Everybody was shocked, nobody con- 
vinced. Mrs. Stowe's book was damned by 
universal consent and withdrawn from public 
sale. 

Lord Lovelace has about the same story to 
tell, and his revival of the horrid scandal would 
go for naught, were it not that he is himself a 
kind of witness against the dead. It would be 
foolish to deny that many people will as such 
accept him. There is nobody now living to 
share or dispute his preeminence in shame. 
Lord Lovelace should have a portion, at least, 
of the burden of Orestes. . . . 

Yes, there are terrible things in this darkly 
perplexed drama of the house of Byron, which 

of Byron in chains was strongly disrelished by the English- 
reading public. One does not easily pick up a copy of her 
book. 



146 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

make it seem like a modern version of the old 
Greek tragedy. Look at the figures in it. A 
great poet — among the very greatest of his 
race — ^beautiful as a god, born to the highest 
place, the spoiled darling of nature and of for- 
tune, dazzling the world with his gifts, drunk 
himself with excess of power, crowding such 
emotion and enthusiasm, such vitality and pas- 
sion, such adventure and achievement, such a 
fulness of productive power within the short 
span of a life cut off in its prime, as have 
scarcely ever marked the career of another 
human being. Never have men's eyes wonder- 
ingly followed so splendid and lawless a comet 
in the sky of fame. Never was man loved 
more passionately, hated more bitterly, ad- 
mired more extravagantly, praised more 
wildly, damned more deeply. His quarrel di- 
vided the world into armed camps which still 
maintain their hostile lines. He was the Na- 
poleon * of the intellectual world and bulked as 
large as the Corsican, with whom indeed he 
shared the admiration of Europe. And by 

* Byron scandalized the England of his day by his great 
and (as it was then regarded) disloyal admiration for 
Napoleon. The text is justified by his famous boast in 
"Don Juan". "Even I myself", he says — 
fVas reckoned a considerable time 
The Grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme. 



THE BLACK FRIAR 147 

Europe he was acclaimed and almost deified 
when England had first exiled and later denied 
him a place in the pantheon of her great. 

Never, too, were great faults redeemed by 
grander virtues, worthy of his towering genius 
— virtues to which the eyes of those who loved 
him still turned with shining hope after each 
brief eclipse of his nobler self, as when the 
sudden summer storm has passed over, men 
seek the sun. Virtues which drew the hatred 
of his race and caste, and have left his name 
as a sword and a burning brand in the world. 

Such is the chief actor in this terrible and 
sinister drama which has lately been unveiled 
by the perfidy of the heir of his blood — the 
son of that "Ada" whom his verse has immor- 
talized. The remaining characters are few, 
which is also fatally in accordance with the 
rules of Greek tragedy. For the most tremen- 
dous dramas of the flesh and the spirit do not 
ask a crowd of performers; two or three per- 
sons will suffice and the eternal elements of 
love and hate. 

So here we have, besides the poet, only the 
unloved and unloving wife, who meekly dis- 
charged her bosom of its long-festering rancor 
ere she left the world; the beloved — perhaps 



148 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

too wildly beloved — half-sister of the poet, 
whose memory (in spite of the hideous 
calumny laid upon her) is like a springing foun- 
tain of bright water in the hot desert of his 
life; * and, lastly, the evil grandson in whom 
the ancestral curses of the house of Byron have 
found a terribly fit medium of execution and 
vengeance. It seems a circumstance of added 
horror that this parricidal slanderer should be 
a hoary old man, while the world can not 
imagine Byron save as he died, in the glory 
and beauty of youth. 

What madness possessed the man? Was it 
perhaps the hoarded rage and bitterness of 
many years, that he should have been com- 
pelled to live his long life without fame or 
notice, in the shadow of a mighty name? A 
wild enough theory, but such extraordinary 
madness as my Lord Lovelace's will not allow 
of sane conjecture. One does not pick and 
choose his hypotheses in Bedlam. 

That my Lord Lovelace is mad doth suf- 
ficiently, indeed overwhelmingly, appear from 

* In the desert a fountain is springing, 
In the wide waste there still is a tree, 
And a bird in the solitude singing 
Which speaks to my spirit of thee. 

[Byron to his sister.] 



THE BLACK FRIAR 149 

his part in this shameful and lamentable busi- 
ness; but, as often happens in cases of reason- 
ing dementia, the truth comes out rather in 
some petty detail than in the general conduct. 
Thus, at the outset, he orders his charges very 
well and maintains a semblance of dignity that 
would befit a worthier matter. One is, pass- 
ingly, almost tempted to believe that the noble 
lord has been moved to the shocking enter- 
prise by a compelling sense of moral and even 
filial obligation. He seems to speak more in 
sorrow than in anger and comes near to win- 
ning our sympathy, if not our approval. This 
at the threshold of his plea. But his malignity 
soon reveals itself, horrifying and disgusting 
us, and suddenly the detail crops up — the little 
thing for which intelligent alienists are always 
on the alert — and losing all control, he aban- 
dons himself to the utter freedom of his hatred 
and his madness. I refer now to the atrocious 
passage in his book in which he exults over 
the alleged fact revealed by the post-mortem 
examination of Byron's remains — that the 
poet's heart was found to be partly petrified or 
turned into stone! 

A pretty bauble this to play with ! There 
are saner men than my Lord Lovelace trying 



150 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

to seize the moon through their grated win- 
dows, and coming very near to doing it — oh, 
very near I 

But I should like to have a look at my Lord 
Lovelace's heart! . . . 

Lovers of Byron's fame may be glad, at 
least, that the worst has now been said and 
calumny can not touch the great poet further. 
Ever since his death nearly a hundred years 
ago,* the hyenas of scandal have wrangled 
over his grave, shocking the world in their 
hunt for uncleanness. All the nameless things 
that delight to see greatness brought low, 
genius disgraced, the sanctuary of honor defiled 
and the virtue of humanity trampled in the 
dirt, were bidden to the feast. Those obscene 
orgies have lasted a long time: they are now 
at an end. The unclean have taken away the 
uncleanness, if such there was, and are dis- 
persed with their foul kindred in the wilder- 
ness. The clean remains, and all that was truly 
vital and imperishable of Byron — the legacy of 
his genius, the inspiration of his example in 
the cause of liberty, the deathless testimony of 
his spirit for that supreme cause, and his flame- 

* Byron died in 1824. 



THE BLACK FRIAR 151 

hearted protest against the enthroned Sham, 
Meanness and Oppression which still rule the 
world. These precious bequests of Byron we 
have immortal and secure. As for the rest — 

Glory without end 
Scattered the clouds away, and on that name 

attend 
The tears and praises of all time! 



X 

LAFCADIO HEARN 

HAS the Silence fallen upon thee, O 
Lafcadio, in that far Eastern land of 
strange flowers, strange gods and 
myths, where thou, grown weary of a world 
whence the spirit of romance had flown, didst 
fix thy later home ? Art thou indeed gone for- 
ever from us who loved thee, being of thy 
brave faith in the divinity of the human spirit, 
and art thou gathered to a strange Valhalla 
of thy wiser choice, — naturalized now, as we 
may of a truth believe, among the elect and 
heroic shades of old Japan? Is that voice 
stilled which had not its peer in these lament- 
able days, sounding the gamut of beauty and 
joy that has almost ceased to thrill the souls 
of men? Child of Hellas and Erin, are those 
half-veiled eyes, that yet saw so deeply into 
the spiritual Mystery that enfolds our sensu- 
ous life, forever closed to this earthly scene? 
Hath Beauty lost her chief witness and the 
152 



LAFCADIO HEARN 153 

Lyre of Prose her anointed bard and sacerdos? 
Shall we no more hearken to the cadences of 
that perfect speech which was thy birthright, 
sprung as thou wert from the poesy of two 
immemorial lands, sacred to eloquence and 
song? . . . 

Ill shall we bear thy loss, O Lafcadio, given 
over as we are to the rule and worship of 
leaden gods- Thou wert for us a witness 
against the iron Law that crushed, and ever 
crushes, our lives; against the man-made su- 
perstition which impudently seeks to limit the 
Ideal. From beyond the violet seas, in thy 
flower-crowned retreat, thou didst raise the 
joyous paean of the Enfranchised. Plunged 
deep into mystic lore hidden from us, explor- 
ing a whole realm of myths and worships of 
which our vain science knows nothing, thou 
wouldst smile with gentle scorn at the mon- 
strous treadmill of creeds and cultures — gods 
and words — where we are forever doomed to 
toil without fruit or respite. 

We hearkened to thy wondrous tales of a 
land whose babes have more of the spirit of 
Art than the teachers of our own; where love 
is free, yet honored and decency does not con- 
sist in doing that privately which publicly no 



154 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

man dare avow; where religion, in our sophis- 
tical sense, does not exist, and where crime, 
again in our brutal sense, is all but unknown. 
We heard thee tell, with ever more wonder, 
how this people of Japan has gone on for hun- 
dreds, nay, thousands of years, producing the 
humblest as well as the highest virtues with- 
out the aid of an officious rehgion; how these 
Japanese folk have the wisdom of age and the 
simplicity of childhood, being simple and 
happy, loving peace, contented with little, re- 
spectful toward the old, tender toward the 
young, merciful toward women, submissive 
under just authority, and loving their beautiful 
country with a fervor of patriotism which we 
may not conceive.* 

All this and more didst thou teach us, Laf- 
cadio, in the way of thy gracious art, with 
many an exquisite fancy caught from the legen- 
dary lore of ancient Nippon, and with the 
ripe fulness of thy strangely blended genius. 
So we listened as to a far-brought strain of 

* This was written shortly after the death of Hearn in 
1905. Elsewhere I have noted {vide "New Adventures") 
that in his later years Hearn experienced a certain dis- 
illusionment in regard to the Japanese. It appears from his 
letters that as his exile lengthened he felt the prose of the 
East more than the poetry ; while to the very end he resented 
the Occidentalizing process at work in Japan. 



LAFCADIO HEARN 155 

music, and were glad to hear, hailing thee 
Master — a title thou hadst proudly earned. 
Yet even as we sat at thy feet drinking in the 
tones of thy voice, there came One who touched 
thee quickly on the lips — and we knew the rest 
was Silence. . . . 

Peace to thee, Lafcadio, child of Erin and 
Hellas, adopted son and poet of Nippon. Thy 
immortality is sure as the dayspring; for thou 
sleepest in the Land of the Sunrise . . . and 
Nippon, who has never learned to forget, 
watches over thy fame I 



II 

LAFCADIO HEARN was a poet working 
in prose, as all true poets now inevitably 
are, a literary artist of original motive and 
distinction among the rabble of contemporary 
scribblers. For these two things a man is not 
easily forgiven or forgotten when he has 
passed the Styx. 

Half Irish, half Greek, the flower of this 
man's genius took unwonted hue and fragrance 
from his strangely blended paternity; the 
hybrid acquired a beauty new and surprising 
in a world that looks only for the stereotype. 



156 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Despairing of the tame effects produced by 
regularity, Nature herself seems to have set an 
example of lawlessness. 

Lafcadio Hearn took care to avoid the con- 
ventional in the ordering of his life as sedu- 
lously as in the products of his brain. For 
this, the man being now dead and silent, the 
conventional takes a familiar revenge upon his 
memory. 

The conventional — lest we forget — is the 
consensus of smug souls, the taboo uttered by 
mediocrity, the Latin invidia whereat Flaccus 
flickered, with all his assurance. It has much 
the same voice in every age. 

Notwithstanding, one plain fact, avouched 
by all human experience, may reassure the 
wide-scattered fraternity of those who prize 
the work and cherish the memory of Lafcadio 
Hearn. It is this : — No man ever succeeded in 
writing himself down better or worse than he 
really was. You may write, but the condition 
is that you make a faithful likeness of yourself 
— nothing extenuate nor set down aught in 
malice. 

The true Lafcadio Hearn, the shy, pitiably 
myopic genius nursed on tears, the dreamer of 
strange dreams, the prose poet of a new dower 



LAFCADIO HEARN 157 

of fancy, the weaver of hitherto unwrought 
cadences for the inner ear, the latest brave 
worshipper of truth and beauty, — where shall 
we look for him but in his enduring work?^ — 
soul and man to the essential life ! 

I have been re-reading the work of Hearn, 
and an old conviction of mine is thus reaf- 
firmed, — -that in him we have to reckon with 
one of the few men of the Nineteenth century 
who made literature that promises to endure. 

The "Life and Letters" by Elizabeth Bis- 
land is a worthy piece of literary craftsman- 
ship. The appreciation of Hearn both as man 
and artist is suffused with the warmth and 
color of a generous woman's temperament. 
More critical and tempered estimates will be 
written, as time goes by and he comes into his 
own, but none that can ever supersede Eliza- 
beth Bisland's charming work. She has done 
well for her friend throughout, but her care 
in gathering and presenting the Letters is 
really a priceless service to his memory and an 
addition to the treasures of literature. 

Hearn was often doubtful of his blessings, 
and there was one which he perhaps never 
justly estimated. I mean his relation to a small 
but interested circle of friends for whom he 



158 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

was moved to pour himself out with the frank- 
ness and force that characterize his letters. 
Mind, I do not say that Hearn failed to ap- 
preciate his friends, but I suspect that he did 
not fully realize his blessedness in having a 
few friends whom he found a real pleasure in 
writing to, and who challenged him, as it were, 
to the fullest self-revelation. 

Literary men nowadays are too self-con- 
scious to write good letters, or they lack the 
talent (which is perhaps nearer the mark), or 
they prefer to telegraph, or they wish to save 
all for the shop. But we must not forget that 
it takes two to write a real letter — one to sum- 
mon and one to send it. In very truth, such 
letters as give the world delight are a real 
collaboration, though the work be signed by 
only one hand. 

We should not have Lamb's Letters (choic- 
est of all the epistolary tribe) but for Words- 
worth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Procter, Manning, 
Cary, et al.; and we should not have Hearn's 
but for Miss Bisland and Messrs. McDonald, 
Chamberlain, Krehbiel, Hendrick, and others. 

Moreover, if the credit of authorship is but 
for the hand that held the pen, there is honor 
and remembrance for the silent collaborators. 



LAFCADIO HEARN 159 

I doubt if Hearn ever thought of his letters 
as a literary asset, yet they are being eagerly 
read by many who are incapable of the deli- 
cate esoteric beauty of his Japanese creations. 
The reason is plain: Hearn's letters tell the 
most fascinating story in the world. The story 
of a man of true genius who fought a brave 
fight through long years against poverty, half- 
blindness, and all the misfortunes of an un- 
toward fate, until he finally achieved some 
image of the Ideal that haunted him, and set 
his light on a hill where all the world might 
see it. The story, too, of a man who never 
took himself as a hero, nor asked to be taken 
as such, but made his hard course as pluckily 
as if the world's applause attended him. Who 
was never at pains to make himself out dif- 
ferent from what he was, but gave a true like- 
ness which, by the grace and fortune of genius, 
turns out to be an incomparable Portrait of a 
Man I 

These letters of Hearn are, in truth, hardly 
inferior to any in our literature. I am not sure 
but that they give us the most interesting and 
faithful picture of a true literary man's life, 
of his soul and his environment, that literature 
affords. Like Lamb's letters, they complement 



i6o AN ATTIC DREAMER 

his formal literary work, and are even su- 
perior to it on several counts, as in their deep 
human interest, their flashing fun and satire, 
their touches of quaint wisdom, their treasures 
of patient observation. 

Ill 

THESE ten or a dozen handsome volumes, 
then, represent the hterary bequest of 
Lafcadio Hearn: it was to give these that he 
lived and toiled and suffered. "Give" is the 
word, for little enough he got from them in 
the way of compensation. No writer ever 
more fully exemplified the truth that the high- 
est service in literature goes unpaid. Compen- 
sation of a kind there was indeed for Lafcadio 
Hearn, — the compensation that arises from the 
doing of one's chosen work, the fulfilment of 
one's artistic instinct, the gratification of that 
craving need of expression which is at once 
the joy and penalty of such a nature as his. 
But of money, or success in the common accept 
tation, there was so little for him that he may 
truly be said to have given all his work for art's 
sake. In 1903, with less than two years to live. 



LAFCADIO HEARN i6i 

we find him writing to Mrs. Wetmore (Eliza- 
beth Bisland) : 

"Literary work is over. When one has to 
meet the riddle of how to live, there is an end 
of revery and dreaming and all literary 'labor- 
of-love.' It pays not at all. A book brings 
me in about $300 — after two years' waiting. 
My last payment on four books (for six 
months) was $44. Also, in my case, good 
work is a matter of nervous condition. I can't 
find the conditions while having to think about 
home, which is 'the most soul-satisfying of 
fears,' according to Rudyard Kipling." 

But all his life he had been dedicate to the 
stern muses of Poverty and Labor. Utterly 
incapable of business and bargain-making — 
("the moment I think of business," he says, "I 
wish I had never been bom") — he could not 
peddle his precious mental wares to advantage, 
and so abandoned everything to the shrewd 
bargainers of the publishing trade, — glad to 
do it, too, if they would only let him correct 
his proofs ! This is the recurrent note in his 
private, unreserved correspondence. In 1899 
he writes to one of his best friends, whom he 
chose as his literary executor, Paymaster 
Mitchell McDonald of the United States 
Navy, stationed then at Yokohama : 



i62 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

"Don't know whether I shall appear in print 
again for several years. Anyhow, I shall never 
write again except when the spirit moves me. 
It doesn't pay, and what you call 'reputation' 
is a most damnable, infernal, unmitigated 
misery and humbug. . . . While every book I 
write costs me more than I get for it, it is evi- 
dent that literature holds no possible rewards 
for me; and like a sensible person, I'm going 
to do something really good that won't sell." 

Let us look a little at the artist. I have here- 
tofore set down my own appreciation of Laf- 
cadio Hearn as thinker and writer: my pur- 
pose now is merely to indicate by extracts from 
his letters the considerations by which his ar- 
tistic conscience was quickened and governed. 
Hardly any writer has expressed himself more 
frankly and with less reserve on the self-im- 
posed canons of his art. Not Flaubert himself 
held a more rigorous conception of the func- 
tion and obligation of the writer — the priest- 
ship of art — than this man who advised one 
of his correspondents, a young man debating 
the choice of literature as a profession, to take 
literature seriously or leave it alone! 

How seriously he took it himself, we have 
already seen, and the following extracts 



LAFCADIO HEARN 163 

gleaned at hazard from his letters help us the 
better to understand: 

"All the best work is done the way ants do 
things — by tiny but untiring and regular ad- 
ditions." 

* * * 

"Work with me is a pain — no pleasure till 
it is done. It is not voluntary; it is not agree- 
able. It is forced by necessity. The necessity 
is a curious one. The mind, in my case, eats 

itself when unemployed." 

* * * 

"I write page after page of vagaries, meta- 
physical, emotional, romantic, — throw them 
aside. Then, next day, I go to work rewriting 
them. I rewrite and rewrite them till they be- 
gin to define and arrange themselves into a 

whole, — and the result is an essay." 

* * * 

"Of course, I like a little success and praise, 
— though a big success and big praise would 
scare me; and I find that even the little praise 
I have been getting has occasionally unhinged 
my judgment. And I have to be very careful." 

And hearken to this, O ye impatient acolytes 
in the Temple of Literature, who dream only 
of golden rewards, and ye others, bold traf- 
fickers in a debased art, who measure achieve- 
ment by its money price in the market. 



1 64 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

"Literary success of any enduring kind is 
made only by refusing to do what publishers 
want, by refusing to write what the public 
wants, by refusing to accept any popular stand- 
ard, by refusing to write anything to order." 
* * * 

"I am going to ask you simply not to come 
to see your friend, and not to ask him to see 
you, for at least three months more. I know 
this seems horrid — but such are the only con- 
ditions upon which Hterary work is possible, 
when combined with the duties of a professor 
of literature." 

And this, than which even the letters of 
Lamb yield nothing finer : 

"My friends are much more dangerous than 
my enemies. These latter — ^with infinite sub- 
tlety — spin webs to keep me out of places 
where I hate to go, — and tell stories of me to 
people whom it would be vanity and vexation 
to meet; and they help me so much by their 
unconscious aid that I almost love them. They 
help me to maintain the isolation indispensable 
to quiet regularity of work. . . . Blessed be 
my enemies, and forever honored all those that 
hate me I 

"But my friends! — ah, my friends! They 
speak so beautifully of my work; they believe 
in it; they say they want more of it, — and yet 
they would destroy it! They do not know 



LAFCADIO HEARN 165 

what it costs, — and they would break the wings 
and scatter the feather-dust, even as the child 
that only wanted to caress the butterfly. And 
they speak of communion and converse and 
sympathy and friendship, — all of which are in- 
deed precious things to others, but mortally 
deadly to me, representing the breaking up of 
habits of industry, and the sin of disobedience 
to the Holy Ghost, — against whom sin shall 
not be forgiven, either in this life or the life 

to come." 

* * * 

"The strong worker and thinker works and 
thinks by himself. He does not want help or 
sympathy or company. His pleasure in the 

work is enough." 

* * * 

"One thing is dead sure: in another genera- 
tion there can be no living by dreaming and 
scheming of art; only those having wealth can 
indulge in the luxury of writing books for 
their own pleasure." 

Hearn's philosophy of life, the daily human 
habit of the man, as revealed in these letters to 
a few chosen friends, is not less racy and in- 
teresting than his literary side, and it shows 
him in genial, lovable aspects that will sur- 
prise many who yet recall the old libels upon 
his personal character. He had strong native 
wit (of which he was too sparing in his formal 



1 66 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

literary productions), and, for a dreamer, as- 
tonishing shrewdness of observation. Of him 
it might be said as of Renan, that he thought 
like a man and acted like a child. Though ab- 
normally sensitive and shy, disliking society in 
the most limited sense, on account of his devo- 
tion to his work and also because of certain 
personal disadvantages, his affections were 
warm, sincere and constant. One cannot re- 
sist the belief, — of which indeed there is no 
lack of testimony, — that he was a true friend, 
a fond husband and father, and a genuine lover 
of humanity. 

This article is running beyond bounds, but 
I venture to cite a few more extracts, — always 
from his personal letters, — that shed light on 
the man rather than the writer: 

"We can reach the highest life only through 
that self-separation which the experience of 
illness, that is, the knowledge of physical weak- 
ness, brings." 

* * * 

"How sweet the Japanese woman is! — -all 
the possibilities of the race for goodness seem 

to be concentrated in her." 

* * * 

"My little wife said the other morning that 
there was a mezurashii kedamono in the next 



LAFCADIO HEARN 167 

yard. We looked out, and the extraordinary 

animal was a goat!" 

* * * 

"You do not laugh when you look at moun- 
tains, nor when you look at the sea." 

* * * 

"No man, as a general rule, shows his soul 
to another man; — he shows it only to a wo- 
man. . . . No woman unveils herself to an- 
other woman — only to a man; and what she 

unveils he cannot betray." 

* * * 

"It is only in home-relations that people are 
true enough to each other,— show what human 
nature is, the beauty of it, the divinity of it. 
We are otherwise all on our guard against 

each other." 

* * * 

"No man can possibly know what hfe means, 
what the world means, what anything means, 

until he has a child and loves it." 

* * * 

"Perhaps if my boy grows old, there will 
some day come back to him memories of his 
mother's dainty little world, — the hibachi, — 
the tako, — the garden, the lights of the shrine, 
— the voice and hands that shaped his thought 
and guided every little tottering step. Then 
he will feel very, very lonesome, — and be 
sorry he did not follow after those who loved 



1 68 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

him into some shadowy resting place where the 

Buddhas still smile under their moss!" 

* * * 

"I have at home a little world of about 
eleven people to whom I am Love and Light 
and Food. It is a very gentle world. It is 
only happy when I am happy. If I even look 
tired, it is silent and walks on tiptoe. It is a 
moral force. I dare not fret about anything 
when I can help it, for others would fret more. 
So I try to keep right." 



IV 

THE close of Lafcadio Hearn's life was 
embittered by the loss of his position as 
professor of English Literature at the Im- 
perial University of Tokyo, and no doubt his 
days were shortened by the terrible anxieties 
into which he was thus thrown. His state was 
never so bad as it appeared to his sensitive 
imagination, to his boding spirit hopelessly 
clouded by the misfortunes of his youth ; and a 
remedy was found, alas ! too late. His letters 
about this time are not cheerful reading, but 
they are of the most painful interest and they 
will ever call forth love and pity for the 
struggling and afflicted man of genius who in 



LAFCADIO HEARN 169 

life had known too little of these qualities. I 
quote from one letter written in this sad and 
anxious time to Mrs. Wetmore ; it is especially 
poignant, but the burden is that of others. 

"You will be glad to hear that I am almost 
strong again, but I fear that I shall never be 
strong enough to lecture before a general pub- 
lic. . . . The great and devouring anxiety is 
for some regular employ — something that will 
assure me the means to live. ... I am wor- 
ried about my boy — how to save him out of 
this strange world of cruelty and intrigue. 
And I dream of old ugly things — things that 
happened long ago. I am alone in an Ameri- 
can city, and I have only ten cents in my pocket, 
— and to send off a letter that I must send will 
take three cents. That leaves me seven cents 
for the day's food !" 

Lafcadio Hearn died on September 26th, 
1904, in the fifty- fourth year of his age. The 
story of his last illness and death, as told by 
his faithful Japanese wife, is most quaint and 
pathetic and marked by little touches that re- 
veal the spiritual nobility of the man. True 
to his life-long revolt against the religion of 
gloom and sorrow, he bade her not to weep for 
him, but to buy for his coffin a little earthen 
flower pot, and to bury him in the yard of a 



170 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

small temple in some lonesome quarter. (In 
death as in life the man shrank from the 
world. ) Then she was to play cards with their 
children, and if any people came to ask for 
him, she was to say that he had died some time 
before. 

Though his physical breakdown was gradual 
and he had noted in himself many warnings of 
the Great Change at hand, the end came sud- 
denly. On the eve of his death he dreamed 
that he had gone on a long and distant journey : 
the fulfilment came to him with no more pain 
or struggle than "a little folding of the hands 
to sleep" . . . 

Of him a noble Japanese has written : 

"Like a lotus this man was in his heart . . . 
a poet, a thinker, a loving husband and father, 
and a sincere friend. Within him there burned 
something pure as the vestal fire, and in that 
flame dwelt a mind that called forth life and 
poetry out of the dust, and grasped the highest 
themes of human thought." 

Lafcadio Hearn lies at rest in the far 
Eastern land of Japan, among the strange peo- 
ple whose life he adopted, who gave him a 
home and the love of wife and children, whose 
bravery and virtue, whose national spirit, 



LAFCADIO HEARN 171 

whose beautiful legends and folklore, whose 
ancient and wondrous religion, he interpreted 
with perfect art and deep divining sympathy, 
for an alien world; building thereupon his chief 
title to remembrance. Few writers of our time 
have achieved a more worthy or left a more 
lasting fame. 



XI 

THE DEFENCE OF DAMIEN 

A PERSON all unknown to fame, one 
Rev. Frederic Rowland Marvin, 
makes a sinister bid for notice by im- 
peaching the integrity of Robert Louis Ste- 
venson's motives in writing the celebrated Let- 
ter on Father Damien. 

Needless to recall, the Letter was addressed 
to the Rev. Dr. Hyde, of Honolulu, who had 
cast some very gross and unmerited aspersions 
upon the martyr priest. 

Damien, as all the world knows, was a Bel- 
gian missionary priest who had devoted him- 
self to the service of the lepers at Molokai, 
and who, contracting the disease, at the height 
of his vigorous ministry, died among them. 
The question of his saintship cannot be taken 
up by the Church until a hundred years after 
his death. Meantime many people of different 
religions, and some of none at all, regard 

Damien as the only authentic saint of modern 
172 



THE DEFENCE OF DAMIEN 173 

times. Robert Louis Stevenson was unques- 
tionably of this opinion. 

The Rev. Dr. Hyde, of Honolulu, in a letter 
to a brother parson (the Rev. H. B. Gage) 
made the hideous charge that Damien had be- 
come infected with leprosy through sexual in- 
tercourse with the women lepers of Molokai; 
characterized him as "a coarse, dirty man, 
headstrong and bigoted", and sneered at the 
chorus of praise which his heroic death had 
evoked. All of which was extensively circu- 
lated by religious papers of the Hyde denomi- 
nation. 

This precious testimony came under the eye 
of Robert Louis Stevenson, who had himself 
visited the leper colony when Damien was "in 
his resting grave", and had collected the whole 
truth regarding him from the witnesses of his 
life and death. By a useful coincidence, the 
author had likewise seen the reverend slan- 
derer Hyde and held converse with him at his 
"fine house in Beretania street" (Honolulu). 

The posthumous attack upon Damien by a 
rival but recreant missioner, breathing a sec- 
tarian malignity rare in our time, touched that 
fiery intrepid soul to an utterance which ranks 
with the highest proofs of his genius and the 



174 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

best fruits of the liberal spirit. His Letter 
on Father Damien is, in truth, the quintessence 
of Stevenson, the choice extract of his passion 
and power, his deep-hearted hatred of injus- 
tice, his princelike contempt of meanness, his 
loathing scorn of religious bigotry, his tender- 
ness, delicacy, and chivalry, — all conveyed in 
a flawless triumph of literary art. Not vainly 
did he boast: 

"If I have at all learned the trade of using 
words to convey truth and to arouse emotion, 
you have at last furnished me with a subject." 
And again: "I conceive you as a man quite be- 
yond and below the reticences of civiUty; with 
what measure you mete, with that it shall be 
measured to you again; with you, at last, I re- 
joice to feel the button off the foil and to 
plunge home." 

I can never read the Letter to Hyde without 
seeing a flame run between the lines; I never 
lay it down that I do not at once bless and 
damn the Rev. Dr. Hyde for having provoked 
it: indeed there is a sort of merit in having 
challenged such a flagellation. But not being 
myself parson-led, I wish the gentleman no 
worse damnation than is assured to him in 
Tusitala's honest tribute. 



THE DEFENCE OF DAMIEN 175 

Well, this is the piece of work which Dr. 
Marvin — he is, it appears, a parson like the 
eternally disgraced Hyde — seeks to disparage 
by attainting the integrity of the knightliest 
figure of modern letters. Let us see how this 
bold parson achieves the asinine exploit of 
kicking the dead lion and betraying his folly to 
the worlds 

After stating the extraordinary assumption 
that Stevenson's Letter on Father Damien 
"was never regarded as anything more than a 
striking exhibition of literary pyrotechny", Dr. 
Marvin proceeds to judgment as follows: 

"Stevenson's letter was, I am fully per- 
suaded, more the work of the rhetorician than 
of the man. He was carried away by the op- 
portunity of making a rhetorical flourish and 
impression, and so went further than his own 
judgment approved. Stevenson was a man of 
many noble qualities, and conscience was not 
wanting as an element of power in his life, but 
his letter to Dr. Hyde was not honest, nor had 
it for any length of time the approval of his 
own inner sense of right and justice. He did 
not really believe what he wrote, neither did 
he intend to write what he did. The tempta- 
tion from a literary point of view was great, 
and the writer got the better of the man." 



176 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Here the parson speaks in no uncertain 
tone — a mere literary man would not so frame 
his indictment. But what a gorgeous piece of 
impudence ! 

I would not take the Rev. Dr. Marvin too 
seriously, but lest any person with the wit of 
three asses should be deceived by his shallow 
effrontery, one feels bound to notice it. And 
since the Rev. Doctor has of his own free will 
made himself yoke-fellow with the defamatory 
Hyde, it is but just that he be clothed with the 
full dignity of his election. 

To discuss the foolish, nay vicious question 
which he has raised concerning Stevenson's 
honesty of motive in writing the Letter to Dr. 
Hyde, would shame any man — not a parson — 
of common sense. Nor is it needful in any 
case, Dr. Marvin sufficiently putting himself 
out of terms in these words: "The temptation 
from a literary point of view was great, and 
the writer got the better of the man." 

Now, lovers of Stevenson have no need to 
be reminded that such was his passionate care 
to avoid the slightest doubt of his sincerity in 
writing as he did upon Damien and to repel 
the stock literary imputation here uttered by 



THE DEFENCE OF DAMIEN 177 

a worthy champion of Hyde, that the X^etter 
was printed originally for private distribution 
only. Although the public demand for it soon 
became irresistible, Stevenson consistently re- 
fused to touch a penny from the publication. 
In 1890 he put this bluntly to a London pub- 
lisher who wished to bring out an edition : — 
"The Letter to Dr. Hyde is yours or any 
man's. I will never touch a penny of remunera- 
tion. I do not stick at murder: I draw the 
line at cannibalism. I could not eat a penny 
roll that piece of bludgeoning had gained for 
me. . . . 

"If the world at all remember you" (said 
the Letter to Hyde) "on the day when Damien 
of Molokai shall be named Saint, it will be in 
virtue of one work : your letter to the Rev. 
H. B. Gage." 

Was ever such a sight vouchsafed to gods 
or men as this of the Rev. Dr. Marvin 
struggling belatedly to win for himself a small 
title in that infamous remembrance — to snatch 
a rag from the garment of shame which the 
great artist fitted upon Dr. Hyde in 
his character of Devil's Advocate against 
Damien? . . . 

The defence of Damien remains one of the 
cherished documents of the free spirit. I thank 



178 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Dr. Marvin for having given me an occasion 
of re-reading it, and I cheerfully accord him 
the grace of having moved me to perform this 
religious duty twice, instead of (my usual 
practice) once, in the year. I can but wonder 
what manner of man is he that it should have 
done him so little good; yet I know I shall love 
it the more that its truth is thus again proven 
by the futile attacks of a spiritual fellow to 
Hyde. 

Yes, I re-read — as, please God, often I shall 
re-read — that true story of Damien's martyr- 
dom, bare and tragic as Molokai itself, traced 
by the hand of one who had no sympathy of 
religious faith with him but only the common 
kinship of humanity — "that noble brother of 
mine and of all frail clay". I read again, with 
quickened pulse, of the lowly peasant priest, 
who, in obedience to the Master's call, "shut 
to with his own hand the doors of his 
sepulchre I" I saw once more that woeful pic- 
ture of the lepers' island, surrounded by a great 
waste of sea, which to those condemned 
wretches spells the black despair of infinity: 
— in its midst the hill with the dead crater, the 
hopeless front of precipice, the desolation there 



THE DEFENCE OF DAMIEN 179 

prepared by nature for death too hideous for 
men to look upon. Again I made that melan- 
choly voyage to Molokai and wept with Tusi- 
tala as he sat in the boat with the two sisters, 
"bidding farewell, in humble imitation of 
Damien, to the lights and joys of human Hfe". 
I shuddered to mark the fearful deformations 
of humanity that awaited us on the shore — the 
population of a nightmare — every other face 
a blot on the landscape. I saw the place was 
an unspeakable hell even with the hospital and 
other improvements, lacking when Damien 
came there and "slept that first night under a 
tree amidst his rotting brethren". I visited 
the Bishop-Home, whose every cup and towel 
had been washed by the hand of "Dirty 
Damien". I saw everywhere the tokens of his 
passage, who "by one striking act of martyr- 
dom had directed all men's eyes on that dis- 
tressful country — who at a blow and the price 
of his life had made the place illustrious and 
public". I thought upon that great and simple 
renunciation, daunting the mind with its sheer 
sacrifice which, better far than all the loud- 
.jongued creeds, brought the living Christ 
within sight and touch and understanding. 
And these wonderful lines of Browning came 



i8o AN ATTIC DREAMER 

into my mind with a sudden vividly realized 
meaning and pathos: 

Remember what a martyr said 

On the rude tablet overhead: 

"I was born sickly, poor and mean, 

A slave — no misery could screen 

The holders of the pearl of price 

From Caesar's envy; therefore twice 

I fought with beasts, three times I saw 

My children suffer by his law; 

At last my own release was earned; 

I was some time in being burned, 

But at the close a Hand came through 

The fire above my head, and drew 

My soul to Christ whom now I see. 

Sergius, a brother, writes for me 

This testimony on the wall — 

For me, I have forgot it all." 

(Since this essay was written, I have met 
with other writings of Dr. Marvin's which 
justify a more favorable estimate of his mind 
and motives than is herein expressed. No 
doubt he erred chiefly through excess of loyalty 
to his cloth — but his error remains, uncon- 
fessed and unexpiated, in a printed book. Even 
so, a humble servant of Literature may be al- 
lowed to owe a duty to his order, which in 
this instance, he conceives, is also a duty to the 
higher cause of Truth. M.M.) 



XII 

A PORT OF AGE 

READER, when for you as for me the 
wild heyday of youth is past, and the 
heart of adventure all but pulseless, 
there is yet remaining to us a wonderful and 
untried realm of romance. When churlish 
Time shall think to retire us from the heat and 
zest of life, classing us, too prematurely, as 
"old boys," there is still a trick we may turn to 
his discomfiture. When the younkers club their 
foolish wits for a poor joke at our expense — 
what is so utterly inane to maturity as juvenile 
humor, green-cheese pleasantry, pithless, 
fledgeling conceits? — we who are wise know 
that the best of the game is still for us; nor 
would we change with the reckless spendthrifts 
who mock us from the vanity of twenty year. 

It's ho for candles, a book and bed ! 

For candles, the modern equivalent, of 

course. I prefer a strong, well-shaded lamp 

to electric light or gas; the rockefeller burns 
i8i 



1 82 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

with a steady flame, does not sputter, or 
dwindle, or go out entirely, leaving you in a 
sulphuric darkness. But the wick should be 
trimmed by the hand of her who loves you best 
in the world; by her, too, must the reading 
table be adjusted cosily at the head of the bed, 
so that the incidence of the gently burning 
flame may be just right — the more or less in 
these matters is of infinite significance; by her 
must the books and, above all. The Book, be 
disposed ready to the discriminating hand of 
the Sovereign Lector. 

Oh ! — and, of course, the pipes or cigars. 
No smokeless person hath any rights in this 
kingdom; he cometh falsely by his investiture; 
he is a Bezonian without choice; a marplot and 
spy — out with him I . . . 

As to the time of going to bed, I would say 
eight o'clock, or half after eight; not earlier 
nor later, though the point need not be strained 
to a finical nicety. But one can not conven- 
iently go to bed amid the daylight business of 
the house, nor before supper, nor too soon 
after it. I knew a man who perversely in- 
sisted upon going to bed at five o'clock; he 
never rose to the dignity of a true bed-reader, 
and that which is, properly used, the most de- 



A PORT OF AGE 183 

lightful of Indulgences, became in the end, to 
this person, a formidable dissipation. Like a 
bad mariner, he was constantly out of his reck- 
oning and at last came to grief: the fact that 
he was a hater of the emollient weed no doubt 
aided the catastrophe. 

But assuming that all the unities have been 
fulfilled, that the Book, the Reader and the 
Bed are in the most fortuitously fortunate con- 
junction, will you tell me that the world has 
a sweeter pleasure to bestow, a more pro- 
foundly satisfying, yet not enervating, luxury 
of indulgence? 

Recall an instant that first delicious thrill of 
relaxed ease, of blissful security, of complete 
physical well-being — every nerve telegraphing 
its congratulations and your spinal column in- 
toning a grand sweet song of peace ! You are 
now between the snowy sheets, and the Elect 
Lady is looking tenderly to the pillows, etc., 
while you are tasting the most exquisite of 
sensations in the back of your calves. This is 
the veritable nunc dimittis moment of the ex- 
perience; you are prepared, soothed and dulci- 
fied for what the Greeks called euthanasy; 
could that old classic idea of dissolution afford 
you a sweeter pang? 



1 84 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

But, man, you're not dying like a rose in 
aromatic pain — ^you're simply going to bed to 
read. And here the Elect Lady, giving a final 
pat to the pillows, leans over, kisses you fondly 
and says, "All right now, dear?" 

To which you reply (dissembling an internal 
satisfaction violent enough to alarm the po- 
lice) — "All right now, darling, thank you — 
but just push the cigars a bit nearer — there. 
And be sure you tell Mary to keep the children 
quiet. And, of course, you won't forget to 
bring it up later — with a good bit of ice; so 
soothing after the mental excitement of a 
strong author. Thank you, dear." 

These details will often be varied — the un- 
wedded reader is not, I think, steeped in such 
felicity, and of course there be instances where 
the married lector does not come at his desire 
so featly — but the outline remains the same. 
And the result arrives, as the French say: that 
is, my gentleman comes to book and bed. 

Then truly is he in that happy state de- 
scribed by the poet, — 

^'The world forgetting, by the world forgot" ; 

raised to the Nirvana of the mind; close- 
wrapped in the eider-down security of his little 



A PORT OF AGE 185 

kingdom that knoweth no treasons, stratagems 
or insurrections; in the world and yet not of 
it, Hke unto, though in a different sense from, 
the Apostolic figure; tasting the pure pleasures 
of the intellect with a delicious feeling of men- 
tal detachment and at the same time a caress- 
ing consciousness of bodily ease; no other 
troubling imperium in his imperio — no thief 
in his candle — no fly in his ointment — nothing 
but the Book and his Absoluteship ! 

It is, Socratically considered, the only ra- 
tional method of reading — the most univer- 
sally abused of all the liberal arts. Are there 
not persons who make a foolish pretence of 
reading on railways trains, or in public res- 
taurants, or in hotel lobbies, or even in theatres 
between the acts; — nay, sometimes, by a piece 
of intolerable coxcombry, during the play it- 
self? Whip me such barren pretenders! — 
there is not a reader among them all. 

I am not sure that there is higher praise 
(for the intellectuals) than to be called a good 
reader, which is to say, a bed-reader. For the 
true reader (lector in sponda) is only less rare 
than the genuine writer; his genius no less a 
native and unacquired attribute; his setting 
apart from the common herd as clearly defined 



1 86 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

and delimited. To be a reader in this, the 
only true sense, is to belong to the Aristocracy 
of Intellect, and to be assured of a philosophy 
which brings to age a crown of delight. 

No man should take up the noble habit of 
reading abed before the age of discretion, that 
is to say, the fortieth year — for at the eighth 
lustrum comes the dry light of reason, which is 
the true essential flame of the bed-reader, and, 
lacking which, he hath as little profit of his 
vocation as the owl at noonday. 

II 

I HAVE for some years made a practice of 
shrewdly canvassing my friends and corre- 
spondents (more or less bookish) on this deli- 
cate subject. I say delicate because, owing to 
a sort of housewifely intolerance much to be 
deplored, the pleasure of reading abed is here 
and there regarded as an illicit and reprehen- 
sible one — I have even heard of one or two 
strong-minded ladies who condemned it as 
"positively immoral". However, as a result of 
my inquiries, I am enabled to pronounce that 
the most delightful of intellectual pastimes is 
in no likelihood of falling into neglect. This, 
too, in spite of the fact that the habit of smok- 



A PORT OF AGE 187 

ing at the same time — a necessary concomitant, 
as I have shown — makes of the indulgence a 
"fearful joy", and occasionally creates a little 
business for the insurance companies. 

But there is scarcely an act of our daily life 
that does not involve some risk or peril, and 
the stout bed-reader (and smoker) will not suf- 
fer himself to be daunted by a slight accident 
or so, or even a hurry call from the fire de- 
partment. Besides, there are some obvious 
precautionary measures which elderly gentle- 
men (in particular) might take in order to 
combine the two delicious habits of reading 
and smoking abed with reasonable safety: e.g., 
neat, removable book-covers of asbestos might 
be provided, with gloves of vulcanized rubber 
or some similar non-inflammable material; and 
if one have the unlucky habit of nodding into 
the lamp, the bonnet de nuit might also be of 
rubber or asbestos. Such an apparatus should 
render the careless bed-reader immune against 
any but the most extraordinary accidents. I 
would not have him feel too safe, however, for 
as stolen pleasures are known to be sweetest, 
so in this matter the bed-reader's gratification 
is heightened and dulcified by a titillant sense 
of lurking danger. Indeed, I make no doubt 



1 88 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

that a spark now and then dropping in the bed- 
clothes, or in the folds of the reader's nighty, 
or in his whiskers (should he haply be val- 
anced) and discovered before any great dam- 
age is done or profanity released, adds appre- 
ciably to the pleasure of the indulgence, and 
is not a thing to be sedulously guarded against. 
However, this is all a matter of taste, for we 
know, without reference to theology, that some 
persons can stand more fire than others. 

This point being settled, I am asked to give 
a list of books or authors suitable to the re- 
quirements of the mature bed-reader (there 
are no others). I do not much rehsh the task, 
as I can not bear to have my pwn reading se- 
lected for me, and the priggish effrontery of 
those lettered persons who are constantly pro- 
posing lists of "best books" (in their estima- 
tion, forsooth!) moves my spleen not less than 
the purgatorial industry of the Holy Office. 
But perhaps I may indirectly oblige my friends 
by glancing slightly at the preferences — or 
mere crotchets, if you will — of an irreclaimable 
bed-reader, who, being entirely quit of the 
vanities of careless youth, has now reached 
that mellowed philosophic age when he would 
rather lie snugly abed with a bright lamp at 



A PORT OF AGE 189 

his pillow and a genial author to talk to him 
than do anything else in the world. Oh, by 
my faith ! 

In the first place, then, I would put books 
of a meditative personal cast, such as have the 
privilege of addressing themselves to the 
reader's intimate consciousness and of beguil- 
ing him into the illusion that their written 
thoughts and confessions are his very own. Of 
such favored books, beloved and cherished of 
the true bed-reader, are the great essayists or 
lay preachers, Montaigne, Bacon, Swift, Addi- 
son, Voltaire, Rousseau, Rochefoucauld, Ma- 
caulay. Lamb, Emerson, Carlyle, Thackeray 
(in his Lectures and Roundabouts), Renan, 
Amiel — but I am resolved not to catalogue. 
These and such as these are emphatically 
thinking books, fit for the quiet commerce of 
the midnight pillow; trusted confessors of the 
soul, through whom it arrives the more per- 
fectly to know itself; faithful pilots in the per- 
plexed voyage of life; wise and loving friends 
whose fidelity is never suspect or shaken; 
solemn and tender counsellors who give us their 
mighty hearts to read; august nuncios that de- 
liver the messages of the high gods. 

I would bar all modern fiction, books of the 



190 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

hour — that swarm of summer flies — all trum- 
pery love stories founded on the longings of 
puberty and green-sickness, all works on 
theology and hagiography (except St. Augus- 
tine's Confessions), poHtical histories, cyclo- 
pedias, scientific treatises, the whole accursed 
tribe of world's condensed or canned literatures 
and such like compilations, the books of Hall 
Caine, Marie Corelli and G. Bernard Shaw,* 
newspapers — that fell brood of time-devourers 
— and magazines — those pictured inanities. 

After this summary clearing of the field, the 
task of selection should not be difficult; but 
even at this stage the prudent bed-reader can 
not afford to go it blind. 

I would not advise books of a violently hu- 
morous character more recent than Rabelais, 
Don Quixote or Gil Bias, even though I may 
here seem to utter treason against my beloved 
Mark Twain. But I must be honest with my 
readers — bed-readers, of course — and truth 
compels me to say that a recumbent position 
is not favorable to much exercise of the dia- 
phragm, which such reading calls for. I took 
Huck Finn to bed with me once when I lay 

* This without prejudice — I am merely indicating a pref- 
erence of the "desipere in loco" order. 



A PORT OF AGE 191 

down for a long illness, and hung to him in 
spite of the doctor and the nurse, until the 
happy meeting with Tom Sawyer, when I wan- 
dered off into a fantastic world where fictions 
and realities were one. The doctor afterward 
said I might have died laughing at any time, 
and now I sometimes think that it wouldn't 
have been such a bad thing — ^nay, I even be- 
lieve that one couldn't chance upon a happier 
kind of death. . . . 

However, I must insist that my friends shall 
sit up to Huck Finn, the Innocents and all that 
glorious family connection, as also to their co- 
sharers in a smiling immortality, Mr. Pickwick 
and Sam Weller. Nor let me forget another 
genial figure who has taken a tribute of harm- 
less mirth, scarcely inferior to theirs, from 
thousands of hearts and whom they would wel- 
come to their benign fellowship — I strongly 
urge the reader who would have a care of his 
health, not to go to bed with Mr. Dooley. 

Ill 

NEXT to the great essayists mentioned 
above, the poets offer the best reading 
for night and the bed — indeed I am not sure 



192 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

but that it is the only way to read certain 
poets. 

I am equally fond of the prose and the 
poetry of Heine, and think he furnishes a 
variety of entertainment which, on several 
counts, is unmatched by any writer. But Heine 
gives no rest, and one is soon overborne by the 
charges of his wit and the unceasing attacks of 
his terrible raillery. 

In the most intimate sense Horace is (of 
course) without a rival as a companion and 
comforter of the nightly pillow. This charm- 
ing Pagan has confessed and will always con- 
fess the best minds of the literate Christian 
world. I know one person who owes his dear- 
est mental joys, his best nocturnal consolations, 
and the very spring of hope itself to the little 
great man of Rome. But he must be read in 
the original — a condition which unfortunately 
disqualifies too many readers. The songs of 
Horace, written in the immortal tongue of 
Rome, can never become antiquated. Though 
the Pontifex and the Virgin ceased hundreds 
of years ago to climb the Capitolian hill, 
though the name of Aufidus is lost where its 
brawling current hurries down, still that treas- 
ure of genius endures, more lasting than brazen 



A PORT OF AGE 193 

column, a joy and a refreshment ever to the 
jaded souls of men. 

Horace has the supreme and almost unique 
fortune to appear always modern, his genius 
being of the finest quality ever known and hap- 
pily preserved in an unchanging tongue. He 
is, for instance, far more modern than Dante 
and distinctly nearer to us than the Eliza- 
bethans. Alone, he constitutes a sufficient 
reason for the admirable, though sometimes 
foolishly censured, practice of reading abed. 
• I do not care to read the plays of Shake- 
speare betwixt the sheets — it seems a piece of 
coxcombry to coolly degust the accumulated 
horrors of Macbeth and Lear while lolling on 
your back and sybaritically exploring the soft- 
est places in your downy kingdom — truly a 
case of what's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba ! 
But I find it quite different with the Poems, 
which (I may remark) are too frequently 
overlooked even by those who pride themselves 
on knowing their Shakespeare. Lately, in Dr. 
Rolfe's admirable edition, I so re-read the Son- 
nets, and for the first time arrived at some- 
thing like a true sense and appreciation of 
their deep organ melodies, and at least a par- 
tial understanding of the strange lawless pas- 



194 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

sion which inspired those wonderful poems that 
witness forever the glory and mayhap the 
shame of Shakespeare.* 

No doubt, the learned Dr. Rolfe had to sit 
up to write his invaluable commentary, with a 
thorny desk at his breast; how much more for- 
tunate I to digest it with unlabored impar- 
tiality, now and then calmly approving or, it 
may be, controverting the Doctor, but without 
heat; reclining at my ease, in a silence and ab- 
straction so perfect that fancy could almost 
hear the living voices of the actors in this 
strange, repellent drama of the greatest of 
poets — stranger and more darkly perplexed 
than any which his genius gave to the stage — 
and the mind overleaped three full centuries to 
that memorable English Spring — 

"When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim 
Did put a spirit of youth in everything. 
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with 
him I" 

Letters of memorable men and women are 
among the pleasantest and most profitable 
reading for the bed. There is so great a plenty 

* The question will, however, always remain a debatable 
one, while Time and the enduring greatness of Shakespeare 
evermore tend to silence it 



A PORT OF AGE 195 

of such books that I need not be at pains to 
specify — and as said before, I refuse to 
catalogue. 

In this domain Voltaire is facile princeps: 
his wise, witty, enchanting letters (which have 
survived in point of living interest the bulk of 
his hundred volumes) give you the very heart 
of that wonderful Eighteenth century — that 
Sphinx rather, some of whose propounded 
riddles the world is even now striving to an- 
swer with enormous travail of blood and tears. 

I may confess that, to my humor. Lamb's 
letters are among the rarest delicia deliciarum, 
the most enjoyable reading, of this rather fas- 
tidious description. 

Dickens's letters are valuable beyond those 
of most later English moderns, for their brave 
and hopeful spirit. And to take a more recent 
instance, Lafcadio Hearn's letters from Japan 
are worthy to be included in our select bed- 
reader's library; indeed there are some not un- 
sapient critics who prefer them to his more 
formal writings. 

Books of autobiography are good, so that 
they be not too veracious, like Franklin's; — a 
defect which pertaineth not to the far prefer- 
able Messer Cellini. Memoirs and personal 



196 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

chronicles I would not forbid, though the Pepy- 
slan hunt has been run to death, out of com- 
pliment to the modern fashion of glorifying the 
indecent Past, and is too often the mark of 
snobbery and a vulgar soul. A man shall not 
leave the empyrean of the poets to put his eye 
to chamber keyholes and his nose to chamber 
utensils with Samuel Pepys. . . . 

Still, I would not deny that there be some 
engaging scoundrels, like Cagliostro and the 
before mentioned Cellini, with whom one may 
have profitable commerce in bed : — a thing that 
during the lives of these worthies rarely 
chanced to any man — or, more especially, any 
woman. 



XIII 



THE KINGS 



IT is Still summer with the kings, God save 
them! — a summer that has lasted for 
many of them over a thousand years. 
They make as brave a show to-day as ever in 
the past. It is said they are neither loved nor 
feared so much as of old, and I know not how 
that may be; but of this I am sure, that the 
glory of kings is the envy of the world. The 
sunlight gilds their palaces and royal capitals, 
and strikes through the many-hued windows of 
their cathedrals in which they deign to accept 
a homage second only to that paid to Divinity 
itself. God is in His heaven, and they are on 
their hundred thrones. 

And these thrones are quite as safe to-day 
as in the olden time when few or none doubted 
that the kings were set upon them by Divine 
Will. Thousands of armed men watch day 
and night to guard their peace. Cannon flank 

the entrances to their castles and palaces. The 
197 



198 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

life of the king is the chief care and preoccu- 
pation of every people — many starve that he 
may live as befits his royal state — many die in 
battle that his throne may be secure. Yet it is 
true, as in the olden timfe, that a king falls now 
and then under the assassin's hand; and the 
wisdom of man has never rightly explained this 
seeming failure of the providence of God. But 
there is a lot for kings as for common men, 
and accidents prove nothing. Kingship is still 
the best job in the world — and there are no 
resignations. Once in a while, it is true, an 
abdication has to be declared on account of the 
imbecility of some crowned head — but think 
how long kings have been breeding kings! 
What wonder that the distemper should now 
and then break out in the royal stud? 

It is summer with the kings. They have 
never been a costlier luxury than they are to- 
day, except that they are not suffered to make 
war so often.* Yet the world continues to 
pay the price of kings with gladness, and 
though we have heard so much of the rising 
tide of democracy, it has not wet the foot of a 
single throne in our time. No doubt it will 
- sweep over them all some day, but our chil- 

* Written before the Great War, 1914-1918! 



THE KINGS 199 

dren's children shall not see it. There is hardly 
a king in Europe whose tenure is not quite as 
good as that of our glorious Republic. King- 
ship is even a better risk than when Canute 
set his chair in the sands of the shore. Wrap 
it up in what shape of mortality you please — 
let it look out boldly from the eyes of a real 
king, as rarely happens; let it peer from under 
the broken forehead of a fool or ogle in the 
glances of a hoary old Silenus, — it is still the 
one thing in the world which absolutely com- 
pels reverence. Other forms of authority are 
discounted more and more ; the Pope who once 
had rule over kings, sees his sovereignty 
dwindled to a garden's breadth; the chiefs of 
republics wield a precarious power, often with- 
out respect : the glory that hedges a king re- 
mains undiminished and unaltered. The kings 
owe much to God, and God owes something 
to the kings — when the world shall have seen 
the last of these, it will perhaps discard the 
old idea of Divinity. But, as I have said al- 
ready, that will take a long, long time — so long 
that it is quite useless to form theories on the 
subject. 

It is summer with the kings. Nowhere such 
radiant, golden summer as in royalty-loving 



200 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Germany. There, big thrones and little thrones 
— such a lot of them ! — are all sound and safe 
— sounder and safer than some of the royal 
heads that peer out from them. There the 
play of kingship has been played with the best 
success to an audience that seldom criticizes 
and never gets tired nor steals away between 
the acts. If the good God composed this play, 
— as so many people piously beheve, — then 
He must hold the honest Germans in special 
favor — as an author He can not but be flat- 
tered. That he does so hold them is evident 
from His permitting them to triumph over 
those incomparably better actors, the French.* 
This charming, prosaic, joyous, antiquated, 
picturesque, yet somewhat dull pageant of 
royalty goes on in Germany forever. If it ever 
came to a stop for but one day, we may be sure 
the honest sun that has beamed approvingly 
upon it for centuries would do likewise. The 
people fully believe that God wrote the play, 
and they cling the more fondly to the belief for 
the reason aforesaid — that it is, like them- 
selves, a little dull. And what matters the 
sameness of the plot or the occasional inca- 
pacity of the leading actors, since the proper- 

*In 1870-1871. 



THE KINGS 201 

ties are as rich as ever and the stage-setting 
worthy of the best representations in the past? 
Yes, it is summer with the kings, and never 
have they seemed safer on their hundred 
thrones. But now as ever in the long story of 
kingship, their safety Hes not so much in their 
castles and forts, their arms and sentinels, their 
myriad spies and their hundred-handed police. 
Not so much in these things as in the sufferance 
of the patient people, and also their childlike 
enjoyment of the old play. From time to time 
the end of the piece is predicted; but it has 
had a famous run, and it will surely keep the 
boards — while there is summer with the kings. 

II 

SOME time ago I wrote that it was sum- 
mer with the kings, but wondrous Is the 
change wrought within a few short months. 
Now Instead of golden summer, with the cour- 
tier sun gilding their palaces and domes and 
towers, and all the world eager to win a smile 
of them, a ray of royal favor, — there Is win- 
ter, black with dread, lurid with rebeUion, and 
sinister with every threat of treason and 
anarchy. 

Though the kings yet hold some show of 



202 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

sovereignty, they are as prisoners in their own 
strong places, beleaguered by the victorious 
people and feeling no trust in the very guards 
of their person. The grand palaces are closed 
up and deserted, and the splendid cathedrals, 
in which so often the Te Deum has been raised 
in celebration of some royal victory, are now 
dark and silent, save for the threnody of 
mourning bells. 

Yes, it is winter with the kings. Panic, ter- 
ror and wild-eyed unrest hold the place of that 
mailed security which had sate at scornful ease 
there during a thousand years. The kings look 
fearfully forth from their strong towers and 
castles, marking the flames of revolution that 
creep steadily nearer and hearing the distant 
shouts of the advancing army of rebellion. No 
heart of grace do the kings find in the thick- 
ness of the encompassing walls or the yet un- 
broken ranks of their soldiery. For every wind 
is now the courier of some new treason or blow 
at their power. Fealty is become a snare that 
watches its chance to kill or betray — ^he that 
rides forth with the royal command shall turn 
traitor ere yet he hath passed the shadow of 
the towers. It is marvellous how loyalty de- 
serts a falling king! 



THE KINGS 203 

Come now the priests in their jnost gorgeous 
vestments and bearing their most sacred 
Images to cheer and console the dejected 
monarch. Of their fidehty he Is at least as- 
sured, for to him and him alone they owe the 
grandeur of their state. But alas! what are 
priests to a king who has lost his people? . . . 
nay, they but remind him in his bitter despair 
of that Power which "hath put down the 
mighty from their seat and hath exalted them 
of low degree". Idly as he had often marked 
the solemn words, they come back to him now 
with a terrible weight of meaning. Almost he 
could bring himself to spit upon these fawning 
priests who had ever feared to show him the 
naked purport of the accusing test that now 
pierces his heart like a sword. And he turns 
away from their mummeries lest he should cry 
out against the treachery of their God and his 
who has thus abandoned him in his need. 

It is winter with the kings. That old habit 
of loyalty and obedience which held their 
thrones as If mortised and tenoned in granite, 
has vanished in an hour. Oh, the kings can 
not see how long It took to mine and shatter 
their rock of sovereignty, and they blindly re- 
gard as the madness of a moment what has 



204 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

been the patient labor of centuries. Do not 
flout them in their fallen state by telling them 
that no hands wrought so busily at the work 
of destruction as their own. Have pity on the 
humbled kings ! 

But wait! — all can not yet be lost. Call in 
the leaders of the people and let us pledge our 
kingly word anew to grant the things they ask. 
'Tis but a moment's humiliation and the fools 
will be content and huzza themselves back into 
our royal favor. Think you we do not know 
the cattle ? Ho, there ! — let the varlets be 
shown into our presence. 

Alas, Sire ! — it is now too late. Hard 
though it be to credit, the besotted people — 
pardon, Sire, for reporting the accursed heresy 
— have at last abandoned that to which they 
fondly clung in anguish and misery and trial, 
against even the evidence and reason of their 
brute minds, and in spite of all that your royal 
ancestors could do to alienate and destroy — 
their faith in kings! 

But this is madness ! — it can not be. What 
will the infatuate, misguided wretches do with- 
out their sovereign ? Answer us that ! 

Craving your gracious pardon. Sire, they 
will do as well as they can. And from what 



THE KINGS 205 

we, your humble councillors, can learn, they ex- 
pect to make shift with a saucy jade wearing 
a Phrygian cap, whom they name Lib- 
erty! . . . 

It is winter with the kings, but summer with 
the peoples who have waited long enough for 
their turn. Lustily are they girded up and 
made ready for the gleaning. Boldly and 
unitedly they march upon the ripe and waiting 
fields which, so often sowed with their blood 
and sweat, they now claim for their very own. 
God grant they may bring the harvest home! 



XIV 

LOUIS THE GRAND 

Yes, I like to dream of the rare old time 

When Louis the Grand was King; 
And here I am moved to say in rhyme 

What his poets might not sing: — 
The mask of powder and scent and lace, 

The court with its splendors gay, 
The sly intrigues, with their wicked grace. 

And the King's own part in the play. 
\_My Favorite Poet} 

AMONG kings the star performer was 
easily Louis Fourteenth of France. 
He knew his role better than any 
crowned mime that has ever lived. He was 
perfect in every detail of its business, and of 
all men who have worn a crown he left the 
largest and most flattering memory of himself. 
The story of Louis Fourteenth has been 
variously told, and most people agree that it 

is one of the most interesting in the world. In 

206 



LOUIS THE GRAND 207 

truth, Clio has lavished upon it much of her 
art and not a little of her irony. There have 
been many attempts to depreciate Louis, or at 
least to measure him by merely human stand- 
ards — without exaggeration, he was God to 
his own world as much as Cassar Augustus was 
to his. The Jacobins during the Revolution 
dragged him from his royal tomb and, apply- 
ing a tailor's tape to the cadaver, found that 
h^was a few inches shorter than his Court be- 
lieved. But it seems to me that they should 
have allowed for shrinkage. Voltaire the 
mocker who, though a courtier, was no great 
lover of kings, writes of Louis with as much 
respect as he could command. The terrible 
rictus — the grin — flickers out here and there, 
to be sure, but for the most part Monsieur 
Arouet keeps his countenance well. An ex- 
cellent judge of ability in kings and commoners, 
there is no doubt that he regarded Louis as 
an able man. As a mere man he was never 
thought of by his own world during the long 
years of his grandeur. People could not look 
at him without a sun-dazzle in their eyes — that 
glory which shut out so much waste of blood 
and treasure, such ruinous devastation of 
peaceful lands, such misery among the serfs of 



2o8 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

the soil, such terror of conscription stalking 
abroad everywhere like a universal Death ! 

Daudet tells a pretty story of a young 
dauphin of France who, with charming naivete, 
alluded to God as "Our Cousin". Louis had 
too much taste to make such a solecism, but 
had he done so we may be sure the Court would 
not have minded it, and the Archbishop of 
Paris would have offered no objection. Heaven 
was never so near any place on this earth as 
it was to Versailles in those days. When 
Madame de Maintenon complained to her 
brother that she could not endure the burden 
of her relations with the King, he remarked, 
"Perhaps you have an idea of marrying 
Almighty God!" 

There were some great men in the time of 
Louis the Grand, but nobody thought of in- 
sulting the King by a comparison with his 
sovereign Majesty. Truly the world never 
saw a more finished actor. Great generals 
trembled when ushered into the Presence and 
scarcely dared look above the King's knee. 
Racine, the greatest poet of the age, having 
written something which gave his Majesty of- 
fence, actually went home and died of grief 
because Louis would not speak to him. This 



LOUIS THE GRAND 209 

is the saddest of his tragedies. There was also 
a caterer who killed himself in the most heroic 
manner because a supply of fresh fish had 
failed to reach Versailles in time for the King's 
dinner. In short, all persons, high or low, 
shared in the illusion produced by the power 
and grandeur, and above all, the personality 
of Louis. For him all poets sang, all sculptors 
carved, all painters painted. Comedy gave 
him her brightest smiles and Tragedy her rar- 
est tears; while in his august cause on a hun- 
dred bloody fields the crested chivalry of 
France rode smiling to death ! 

But nowhere was the dominion of Louis so 
absolute as in the hearts of the women. For 
women love a King — God bless them! — and 
worship, especially of a man, is second nature 
to them. Therein is the secret of their passion- 
ate attachment to royalty in every age and 
country, and doubtless also of their devotion to 
the Church, in which the same idea is symbo- 
lized. Madame de Sevigne was as clever a 
woman as ever lived, with a most penetrating 
look into human nature and much experience 
of life. Yet her letters betray that she was 
under the universal illusion as to Louis, and if 
there be scandal in the Court of Heaven, it 



210 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

could not be whispered more delicately than 
Madame de Sevigne does it. 

Perhaps as an artist the King makes the 
most favorable showing in his affairs with 
women, and to many readers this is the most 
attractive part of his wonderful history. How 
he contrived to carry on his amours, in view 
of the whole Court, without loss of dignity and 
even with perfect decorum, is as choice a bit 
as Clio has in her wallet. He never bungled, 
or hurried, or made a mess of matters, or for- 
got an instant that he was King. In this, as 
in all other things, he was truly magnificent, 
and the lady upon whom his choice happened 
to fall, though she were among the proudest 
and loftiest in the realm, was consumingly en- 
vied for and scarcely deemed herself worthy 
of the intended honor. 

The King's choice of a new favorite was 
usually announced by a gorgeous fete designed 
to express the royal desire. Very soon every- 
body was in the secret, including the Queen, 
who no doubt had the earliest intimation of it, 
and whose admirably resigned conduct, under 
such trying circumstances, was perhaps as 
creditable to Louis as any exploit sculptured 
on his monuments. There were several sue- 



LOUIS THE GRAND 211 

cessive favorites, but Louis was not a volup- 
tuary, in the worst sense, and he never kept a 
half-dozen mistresses in commission at once, 
like the Merry Monarch across the Channel. 
Versailles under Louis never ceased to be a 
palace. Whitehall under Charles the Second 
became and long remained a brothel. A deli- 
cate odor of romance still hovers about the 
adulteries of Louis; the amours of the Stuart 
belong to the pornography of history. 

Another point of difference : the women 
whom Louis had honored with his august affec- 
tions never betrayed and disgraced him, like 
the concubines of Charles, and upon his leav- 
ing them, never turned to other men for con- 
solation. Aut Casar, aut nullus! Like the 
lovely La Valliere, they went into convents, or 
like the superb Montespan, withdrew from the 
Court. It was doubtless of the La Valliere 
that Voltaire was thinking when he said that 
women give themselves to God when they are 
no longer acceptable to men. 

The King was very liberal to his lady 
friends, as well he might be, since it was al- 
lowed that he owned all the wealth of the 
country, and it cannot be denied that he spent 
it accordingly. He showered titles and estates 



212 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

upon his mistresses, and made no distinction 
between his bastards and the legitimate royal 
issue. In this he proved that a strong man can 
overrule every convention. Louis's mistresses 
were in turn the true queens of France, and 
alliance with his bastards was eagerly sought 
by the noblest houses in the kingdom. 

Strange to say, although Louis was one of 
the best Catholics in the world, the Church 
seems to have winked at these little irregulari- 
ties. Bossuet the eloquent never made them 
the subject of a sermon delivered in the pres- 
ence of the great Monarch. In his old age, 
however, Louis did penance for his good times 
by revoking the Edict of Nantes and causing a 
great persecution of his Protestant subjects. 
Some writers ascribe this foolish and cruel act, 
so contrary to Louis's natural kindness, to the 
influence of Madame de Maintenon, who was 
first the mistress and then the privately wedded 
but unacknowledged wife of the King. This 
lady was far from being the most beautiful of 
his mistresses, but she outpointed them all in 
sense and tact. She was of a deep religious 
cast of mind, which in that age was not deemed 
inconsistent with the acceptance of such pleas- 
ures as fell to ladies of high station. The rec- 



LOUIS THE GRAND 213 

onciling of piety and pleasure was, in truth, the 
consummate comedy of the reign of Louis the 
Grand. 

I have taken the somewhat original view that 
Louis was an artist, since he shaped his life in 
such superb fashion, and came tardy off neither 
in his least nor greatest efforts. 

I add a proof : Does not the coquetry of the 
artist speak in his leaving to the world the un- 
solved mystery * of the Man in the Iron Mask? 

• For the solution of this long baffling enigma, which was 
too much even for the keen-witted Voltaire, see the Author's 
"Adventures in Life and Letters." 



XV 

DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER * 

I WAS dining lately at Mouquin's, alone. 
You had better not so dine there, unless 
you have reached that melancholy climac- 
teric, "a certain age" — (I do not plead guilty 
myself). It Is not good for men to dine alone 
at Mouquin's, and it is even worse for Mou- 
quin's. All here is planned for sociability and 
the sexes — the menu Is a paean of sex as frankly 
declarative as a poem of Walt Whitman's; 
the wines, the suave, light-footed French wait- 
ers (really French), seeing all and nothing, the 
softly refulgent electric bulbs, the very genius 
of the place, all bespeak that potent instinct 
which harks back to the morning of the world. 
One sees it In the smallest matters of detail and 
arrangement. Elsewhere there Is room and 
entertainment for the selfish male, but here — 
go to ! The tables are not adapted for solitary 

* Since we are now under the Dry Dispensation, I reprint 
this bit of impressionism mainly for historic reasons. — M. M. 
214 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER 215 

dining; at the very tiniest of them there is 
room for two : an arrangement that would have 
moved the irony of Schopenhauer, and that 
signalizes the grand talent of Monsieur Mou- 
quin. To conclude, a solitary diner is an em- 
barrassment, a reproach, a fly in the ointment 
of Monsieur Mouquin, I was all three to him 
lately, but I make him my most profound apolo- 
gies — it shall not occur again. Why, I am now 
to tell. 

I was dining at Mouquin's alone, and it 
seemed as if the spirit of Schopenhauer sud- 
denly descended upon me, who had been there 
so often, joyous and joyously companioned. 
The waiter took my order with a veiled hint 
of disapproval in his manner. He forgot, too, 
that he was of Mouquin's and therefore, an- 
teriorly of Paris — he spoke English far too 
well for the credit of the house. At Mouquin's, 
you know, the wines and the waiters are alike 
imported. I knew what the waiter was think- 
ing about — I felt and understood his subtly in- 
sinuated reproach : I was alone. There was no 
person of the opposite sex with me to double 
or treble the bill, and to obey whose slightest 
hinted wish the gargon would fly with winged 
feet, a la Mercure. Decidedly it is a violence 



2i6 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

to the Parisian waiter to dine alone at Mou- 
quin's, for it robs him of that pleasing incen- 
tive which is essential to the perfect exhibition 
of his art. I do not qualify the phrase — the 
French waiter at Mouquin's is an artist, and 
never more so than when he rebukes me, word- 
lessly and without offence, for dining alone. 

However, I was a good deal worse than be- 
ing alone or in company, for have I not said 
that Schopenhauer was with me? Do you 
know Schopenhauer? Is he anything more 
than a name to you, — that giant sacker of 
dreams, that deadly dissector of illusions, that 
pitiless puncturer of the poetry of the sexes, 
that daring exposer of Nature's most tenderly 
cherished and vigilantly guarded secrets, whose 
thought still lies like a blight upon the world? 
Do you know his beautiful theory of love which 
is as simple as the process of digestion, and in- 
deed very similar to it? Once in Berlin an 
enthusiast spoke in Schopenhauer's presence of 
the "immortal passion". The Master turned 
upon him with his frightful sneer and asked if 
his bowels were immortal ! . . . 

When Actaeon surprised the chaste Diana 
at her bath, he was merely torn to pieces by 
his own hounds. Schopenhauer's punishment 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER 217 

for betraying the deepest arcana of Nature was 
worse, yet not worse than the crime merited — 
he was compelled to eat his own heart! . . . 
Not, I grant you, a cheerful table-mate for a 
dinner at Mouquin's, when the lights glow 
charmingly, and the bustling waiters, the in- 
coming guests, the rustling of skirts, the low 
laughter indicative of expectancy, and the con- 
fused yet agreeable murmur of voices — the 
bass or baritone of the men mingled with the 
lighter tones of the women — announce a joy- 
ous evening. Charming fugue, in which a deli- 
cate ear may detect every note of appetite and 
passion, though the players use the surd with 
the most artistic precaution. (Mouquin's is 
the most discreet and admirably regulated of 
cafes.) Polite overture to the orgasm of the 
Belly-God and perhaps to the satisfaction of 
certain allied divinities whom I may not spec- 
ify. Admirable convention, by which men and 
women come in sacrificial garments, or evening 
attire, to worship at the shrine of the Flesh. 

The climacteric, perhaps? My dear sir, 
when I tip the waiter to-night, I can get him to 
say easily that I am not a day over thirty. . . . 

Throughout the large room (we are up- 
stairs, gentle reader) the tables are filling rap- 



2i8 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

idly with well-dressed men and women. Noth- 
ing in their appearance, generally, to challenge 
remark; a conventional crowd of male and fe- 
male New Yorkers, intent on a good dinner and 
subsidiary enjoyments. For the first time, per- 
haps, I notice how pleasant it is to observe 
everything at leisure, without having to talk 
to anyone — you really can not see things in a 
detached, philosophic manner when you have 
to jabber to a pretty woman. 

A clerical-looking gentleman, with a severe 
forehead, is one of my near neighbors. His 
companion is a handsome young woman, rather 
highly colored, who seems more at home than 
the forehead. A couple take the table next to 
mine; the young fellow is well-looking enough, 
the girl has the short, colorless, indeterminate 
American face, with its pert resolve to be 
pretty; both are young and have eyes only for 
each other — that's the point. They sit down 
to the table as if preparing for the event of 
their lives; this eager young expectancy is 
smilingly noted by others than myself. 

A large man convoying three heavy, ma- 
tronly women who yet do not look like mothers 
— ^you know that familiar New York type — 
takes a favorable station against the wall 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER 219 

where there is much room for eating and 
whence the outlook is commanding. The large 
one perjures himself fearfully in explaining 
how he had It specially reserved. I know him 
for a genial liar, and maybe the ladies do, too. 
These four have evidently come to eat and 
drink their fill, and to look on: Schopenhauer 
Is no cohcern of theirs, nor they of his. 

Not so this elderly man with the dashing 
young woman on his arm — the man Is too hand- 
some to be called old. In spite of his white hair. 
The young woman has that look of complete 
self-possession and easy tolerance which such 
young women commonly manifest toward their 
elderly admirers — this is not romance, but what 
Is generlcally termed the "sure thing". Scho- 
penhauer Is but faintly interested, and my eyes 
wander toward the little American type. She 
has had her second glass of wine by this time, 
and It has hoisted a tiny flag In her cheek. A 
little more and she will succeed in her deter- 
mination to be pretty, — the dinner is only half 
under way. Schopenhauer bids me note now 
that she eats with undisguised appetite, and 
that she fixes a steadier gaze upon her young 
man than he can always meet. Both young 
heads are together and they eat as fast as they 



220 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

talk — ^but youth atones for all. These two 
continue to draw the gaze of most persons in 
their vicinity. 

There have been one or two mild selections 
by the orchestra, but they passed unnoticed in 
the first stern business of eating. It is a pity 
that artists should be subjected to such an in- 
dignity, but it can not well be avoided by artists 
who play for hungry people. The leader of 
Mouquin's orchestra — perhaps I should say 
the orchestra at Mouquin's — is a young man 
with a high forehead and long hair. I am not 
a critic of music, like my friend James Huneker, 
and I am unhappy in the difficult vocabulary 
which that gifted writer employs. But it seems 
to me the conductor and first violinist at Mou- 
quin's is an artist. A veritable artist 1 No 
doubt I shall be laughed at for this — I have 
said that I am ignorant of the technique of 
criticism. 

When the orgasm of eating had in a degree 
subsided, Schopenhauer nudged me to observe 
how the company began to give some attention 
to the music and even to applaud a little. Ah, 
it was then the young leader seemed grand 
and inspired to me. He looked as if he did 
not eat much himself; and his music — some- 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER 221 

thing from Tannhauser — fell on my ears like 
a high rebuke to those guzzling men and 
women. I do not know for sure what the 
" motif' of it was (this word is from James 
Huneker), but the refrain sounded to me like, 
"Do not be swine ! Do not be swine I" 

The swine were in no way abashed — per- 
haps they did not understand the personal allu- 
sion. I have read somewhere in James Hune- 
ker that the Wagnerian ''motif is often very 
difficult to follow. 

II 

WE had reached the coffee, that psychic 
moment when the world is belted with 
happiness; when all our desires seem attain- 
able; when with facile assurance we discount 
the most precious favors of love or fortune. 

"You will now observe," whispered my in- 
visible guest, "that with these animals the 
present is the acute or critical moment of diges- 
tion, from which result many unclaimed chil- 
dren and much folly in the world. The edge 
of appetite has been dulled, but there is still a 
desire to eat, and the stage of repletion is yet 
to be reached. These animals now think them- 
selves in a happy condition for the aesthetic 



222 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

enjoyment of art and even for the raptures of 
love. They have been fed." 

The terrible irony of the tone, more than 
the words, caused me to turn apprehensively; 
but no one was listening, and my hat and coat 
occupied the chair where should have sat my 
vis-a-vis. 

With the coming of the cordials and the 
lighting of cigarettes, the music changed to 
gayer measures. The young maestro's head 
was thrown back and in his eye flamed the fire 
of what I must call inspiration, in default of 
the proper phrase or hunekerism; while his 
bow executed the most vivid lightning of 
melody. This was the moment of his nightly 
triumph, when his artist soul was in some de- 
gree compensated for the base milieu in which 
his genius had been set by an evil destiny. He 
now saw before him an alert, appreciative audi- 
ence, instead of an assembly of feeding men 
and women. For the moment he would not 
have changed places with a conductor of grand 
opera. 

"Note that foolish fellow's delusion," said 
Schopenhauer. "I have exposed it a hundred 
times. He thinks he is playing to the souls, 
the emotions of all these people, and he plumes 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER 223 

himself upon his paltry art. They also are a 
party to his cheat. He is really playing to 
their stomachs, and their applause, their ap- 
preciation, is purely sensual. Yet I will not 
deny that he is doing them a service in assisting 
the process of digestion; but it is purely physio- 
logical, sheerly animal. The question of art 
does not enter at all, any more than the ques- 
tion of love does in the mind of yonder old 
gentleman who has eaten and drunk too well, 
and is now doting with senile desire upon that 
young woman." 

I noticed indeed that the elderly gentleman 
had become gay and amorously confidential, 
while his companion smiled often with affected 
carelessness, yet seemed to be curiously ob- 
servant of his every word and gesture. But 
their affair was no matter for speculation. 

I glanced toward the clerical gentleman with 
the severe forehead. Both he and the fore- 
head had relaxed perceptibly, and there was 
evident that singular change which takes place 
when a man doffs the conventional mask of self. 
His lady friend seemed disposed to lead him 
further. No romance here, I thought. . . . 
"It is the stuff of all romances," snarled Scho- 
penhauer. 



224 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

The heavy women waddled out once or twice 
to the retiring room and came back to drink 
anew. No man looked at them, save in idle 
curiosity — they were beyond tempting or temp- 
tation. "These represent the consummate 
flower of the sexual or passional instinct," re- 
marked the sage. "Gross as they now seem, 
they were once young and what is called de- 
sirable. They yielded fully to their animal 
requirements — they ate, drank and loved, or to 
speak more correctly, digested — with such re- 
sults as we now see." 

I shuddered . . . but the large women were 
indubitably enjoying themselves. 

There was more music — the guests ap- 
plauded ever the more generously. The leader 
now condescended like a veritable artist — 
a has le cafe! 

I noticed that my little American beauty left 
the room (without her wraps) a bit unsteadily, 
and came back presently, very high in color. A 
drink was waiting for her, and she began talk- 
ing with her young man as if he and she were 
alone in the world. I noticed also that the 
young man carried his liquor rather better and 
seemed to shrink a little under the eyes at- 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER 225 

tracted by the girl's condition. In my ear I 
heard the sardonic whisper of Schopenhauer: 
"They call this love!" . . . 

I would rather dine with a pretty woman at 
Mouquin's or elsewhere, than with any philoso- 
pher, living or dead. Especially Schopen- 
hauer : a has the climacteric ! 



XVI 

ON LETTERS 

THE pleasantest thing in the world to 
receive is a good letter. 
Our dearest literary joys are not 
to be weighed in comparison; indeed they are 
not at all of the argument, for we share them 
with many. But a letter — a true letter I would 
say — belongs to us in an intimate and peculiar 
sense ; something in ourselves has summoned it, 
and perhaps the deepest source of our pleasure 
is, that it could not have been written to an- 
other. 

For it takes two to make a true letter — one 
to inspire and one to write it; one to summon 
and one to send. 

Such a letter is the child of love, and we 
rightly hold ourselves blessed for it. A few 
such letters — none of us can expect many — 
make shining epochs in our lives. 

But these letters are of the rarest, and I 

would now speak rather of such as we may not 
226 



ON LETTERS 227 

too uncommonly hope to receive, supposing 
(egotistically) we have that in us which has 
grace to summon them. 

A genuine letter is the best gift and proof of 
friendship. No man can write it who is only 
half or three-quarters your friend; he might 
give you money — this he could not give. 

I have sometimes been convinced that a man 
was heartily my friend until I received a letter 
from him which showed me my error. Not in- 
deed that such was his desire, nor could I point 
out the word or phrase that enlightened me. 
I knew — that was all. 

This will perhaps seem the very opposite of 
the truth to persons who have never considered 
the matter deeply, and who think nothing is so 
easily given and obtained as a letter. But I am 
writing for those who understand. 

If you have ever been deceived in your 
dreams of friendship, look now over those old 
letters you kept, and you will wonder how you 
could have cheated yourself; the truth you were 
once blind to, stares out from every written 
page. It was there always, but your self-love 
would not see. 

Into every real letter the soul of the writer 
passes. It is this that gives a fabulous value 



228 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

to the letters of great and famous persons con- 
cerning whom the world is ever curious — mak- 
ers of history, poets, warriors, kings and 
criminals, queens and courtesans, all who for 
good or evil cause have gained a lasting re- 
nown. The collectors are justified by a psy- 
chology which few of them can penetrate. 

The letters of some persons of whom we 
possess not a scrap of writing, would be abso- 
lutely priceless. 

Is there, for example, enough worth in 
money to estimate the value of a letter written 
by the hand of Jesus? Can you imagine any- 
thing that would so thrill the world? . . . 

Or, to take a lower and more probable in- 
stance : A First Folio of Shakespeare is worth 
several thousand dollars, and the owner of one 
never has to haggle for his price — the book it- 
self is the ready money. The number of copies 
in the world is accurately known, as well as the 
fortunate owners. Some rich men are content 
with the distinction of possessing this rare vol- 
ume, and they would like to have the fact men- 
tioned on their tombstone. Well, a genuine 
letter of Shakespeare's — say to "Mr. W. H.", 
for example — would probably be worth more 
than all the First Folios in existence. True, 



ON LETTERS 229 

the poet had hardly a thought or sentiment or 
idea that he did not express somewhere in his 
plays or poems. No matter — these were of 
public note, in the way of his calling; what the 
world wants is a look into the innermost soul 
of the man Shakespeare, who has escaped amid 
the glory of the poet. A letter! a letter! 

Charles Lamb offers a notable proof of the 
superiority of genuine letters over mere literary 
compositions. He wrote many letters to his 
friends from his high stool in Leadenhall 
street; letters that have never been equalled for 
quaint humor, shrewd-glancing observation, 
kindly comment on men and manners, and, 
above all, the intimate revelation of one of the 
most charming personalities ever known. Being 
thrifty in a literary sense, and by no means a 
ready writer — he speaks of composing with 
"slow pain" — it was his habit to make his per- 
sonal letters do a double service by turning 
them into essays for the press — and, generally, 
spoiling them. At any rate, I prefer the let- 
ters. 

The truth behind this matter is, that if a 
man be capable and make a practice of writing 
many good letters, he will surely fall off in 
other lines of literary effort. Renan discov- 



230 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

ered this early in his career, and was very 
sparing thereafter of letters which took any- 
thing out of him in a literary way. One might 
call this a sort of economy, keeping the honey 
for the hive. It is not a bad plan, in a thrifty 
sense, but this article can not sympathize with 
it, as it makes for the poverty of letters. 

II 

ONE hears it said often that the age of 
letter-writing is past, and certainly it may 
be granted that the heavy firing in this depart- 
ment of Literature is over and done with. 
Chesterfield and Madame de Sevigne we have 
not always with us, save in their classic re- 
siduum, and few are those who seek to chal- 
lenge their long-maintained primacy. Letter- 
writing is regarded as "slow work" in this 
rapid age — there are the telephone and tele- 
graph, those arch-enemies of the Epistolary 
Muse; and alack! there is the typewriter, that 
marvellous aid to novelists and most effectual 
kill-joy of the letter-writer — why this should 
be so is another curious point of psychology, 
but so it is, as all the world agrees. 

The shy Genius of Letter-writing revolts 
from this mechanical, public contrivance which 



ON LETTERS 231 

must have everything In crude black-and-white, 
and permits of no subtle reticence or half-dis- 
closure, or discreet adumbration, such as we 
may confide to the intimate pen. Perhaps let- 
ter-writing went out with the advent of this 
so-called Tool of Progress and multiplier of 
Popular Fiction. Indubitable it is at any rate 
that while the blood of the true letter-writer 
circulates genially in his pen, it never seems to 
get into the typewriter. 

Even literary persons nowadays, — nay, these 
particularly, I am assured, — are but little given 
to the gentle art of letter-writing. I have been 
astonished by the inept, spiritless, even dull let- 
ters of two or three authors of my acquaintance 
who have a great public vogue on account of 
their reputed wit and brilliancy; — one would 
no more suspect it from their letters than from 
their laundry-bills. Why this anomaly? 
"Thrift, Horatio, thrift!" — these gifted 
authors bring to letter-writing the dregs of 
their minds, saving their spirit, grace, charm 
and sincerity for the shop, i.e., the professional 
"copy". The vital note of sympathy, the in- 
stant flow from mind to mind, in a word, all 
that goes to make a genuine letter, is vain to 
seek in their postal effusions. 



232 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

However, admitting a sensible abatement 
and falling off in the epistolary province, and 
allowing that the classic letter-writers are in 
no danger from contemporary rivalship, I be- 
lieve there is still abundant reason for hope 
and comfort on the part of all who cherish 
true letters. A very ancient scribe has observed 
that the thing which hath been is that which 
shall be. So I think one is justified in holding 
that there will always be good letters written, 
and especially by women — bless their kind 
hearts and busy, fertile minds ! — who, literary 
or unliterary, have from the first use of post or 
messenger scribbled off the best letters in the 
world. 

And why? the skeptical reader may ask. . . . 

It is a large subject and an intricate, com- 
prehending the whole difference between the 
sexes, but for the present occasion we may con- 
tent ourselves with this : There is a peculiar 
sort of abnegation and devotion, an unselfish 
and naive desire to please, implicit in the true 
letter-writer, which rarely falls to the endow- 
ment of mere Man! It must also be conceded 
that in the subsidiary graces of the epistolary 
art, women have always excelled their lords 
and masters (pre-Twentieth century style). 



ON LETTERS 233 

Finally, the deepest word on this point is yet 
to be said, and it is suggested by the Scriptural 
phrase, "Out of the mouths of babes and suck- 
lings". Goodness and purity, loving faith and 
loyalty will continue, as always, to signalize 
this medium of expression. 

I have said that women write the best let- 
ters, and for their dear sake I shrink not from 
what is both a truism and a tautology. Should 
I ever be able to acknowledge the debt I owe 
them? — to pay it were not possible, even in 
dreams. There is dear "E. W. W.", who 
came, a late blessing into my life, just when I 
sorely needed such a friend, and who sends me 
frequently of her rich store of wisdom and 
sweetness and strength, though her pen knows 
no rest and the publishers will not be denied. 
Strange ! — I find in these gracious letters, alive 
with the breath of her spirit, something that 
even she is unable to express in her public writ- 
ings — or is it the vitality of the personal note, 
the concentrated challenge of the intimate 
word, that makes me think so? . . . There is 
charming "T. G.", more beautiful even than 
her poetry, who writes too seldom (thriftiest 
she of the daughters of the Muse), but each of 
whose joyous letters fills with light the happy 



234 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

week of its arrival. And "D. H.", who was 
not long ago "D. M." — what pleasure have I 
not received from her demure gayety and the 
sweet cordial note of her letters 1 . . . And 
"E. R.", who was even more recently "E. H." 
(ah, happy he who won her gracious youth !) — 
in what book shall I find a hint of her tricksy 
humor and bewitching pertness? . . . And 
"B. A.", whose pensive spirit ever seeking the 
Unknown, often startles me with its clear 
divinations — the privilege of the white-souled. 
. . . And "T. S.", whose prattling pen has 
given me cheer when weary and cast down, and 
who is so near to me in faith and sympathy, 
though I have never looked into her candid 
eyes. And "S. B.", the sweet silent Quakeress, 
who too rarely writes, and the thought of 
whom often lies like a sinless peace upon me. 
But let me cite no more lest I tempt the envious 
fates by a rash disclosure of my joys. 

All these most fragrant friendships, enrich- 
ing my else flowerless life with beauty and 
grace and precious consolation, — giving me in- 
deed the rarer life of the spirit,- — do I, though 
undeserving, hold . . . through letters. 



XVII 

THE SONG THAT IS SOLOMON's 

THERE is always a Jewish renaissance, 
and that is why we have lately been 
talking about the beauty of the 
Jewess. 

It is a great theme and there is none other 
in the world charged with more sweet and ter- 
rible poetry. 

The beauty of the Jewish woman is the eter- 
nal witness of the great epic of the Bible. If 
that divine Book were to be lost in some un- 
thinkable catastrophe, it could be re-written 
wholly from the lips and eyes of Jewish beauty. 

In no long time we should have again the 
complete stories of Sarah and the daughters of 
Lot (those forward but provident young per- 
sons) ; of tender-eyed Leah, of Rebekah and 
Rachel, sweet rivals in love; of Deborah and 
Hagar and Jael; of Ruth, that pensive figure 
whom so many generations have strained to 
see, "standing breast-high amid the corn"; of 
235 



236 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Rahab the wise harlot and Jezebel the furious; 
of Tamar who played her father-in-law Judah 
so shrewdly wanton a trick; of Esther who 
fired the heart of the Persic king, saving hon- 
est Mordecai a painful ascension and much 
slaughter of the Chosen People; of Susanna, 
whom the elders surprised in her bath, not the 
first nor the last instance of the folly of old 
men; of Bathsheba, the fatal "one ewe lamb" 
or wife of Uriah, the lust for whose perfect 
body drove the holy king David to blood- 
guiltiness; of the Shulamite (lacking a name) 
whom Solomon, son of David, has sung to the 
world's ravishment; lastly — why not? — of her 
who has glorified Israel among the Gentiles 
and hath honor beyond all the daughters of the 
earth, — Mary of Bethlehem. 

In this way, I repeat, the Bible could easily 
be put together again — it can never perish 
while a Jewish woman remains on the earth. 

There never was a book written (worthy of 
the name) but that was more or less directly 
inspired by a woman. Cherchez la femme is 
the true theory of literary origins. 

This is eminently true of the Bible, with 
which women have had (and still have) more 



THE SONG THAT IS SOLOMON'S 237 

to do than with any other book in the history 
of the world. 

The beauty of Jewish women is a wine that 
needs no bush; It Is the sacred treasure that 
kept alive the hope of the race during the weary 
ages of shame and bondage. But for that 
jealously guarded talisman, the Jew would 
long ago have lost both place and name upon 
the earth. 

Much of the old, consecrated, f atldlc charac- 
ter attaches to the Jewish woman of the better 
class, even In this faithless day. She is hon- 
ored above the wife of the Gentile, and she is 
conscious of a mission which fills her with the 
pride of an Immemorial race. One fancies that 
no other woman either Inspires or returns love 
in such measure as the Jewess; that she has 
some profound joys to give whose secret she 
alone possesses. The Jew has found in his 
home compensations for all the cruelty and 
ignominy which he has had to suffer from the 
world. 

I admire true Jewish beauty so much that I 
would make a slight discrimination. Not all the 
Grecian women were Helens, and It need not 
be said that the highest type of beauty among 
Jewish women is less often seen than praised. 



238 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

In truth, the rule holds good here, that great 
beauty and great ugliness are found side by- 
side. 

One reason for this is, undoubtedly, the bad 
taste of the average Jew, who can not have his 
women fat enough and who, therefore, en- 
courages such departures from the ideal stand- 
ard as serve to caricature the natural beauty 
and comeliness of Hebrew women. I believe 
there are Jews who would like to grow their 
women in a tub, according to the mediaeval 
method of producing monstrosities. This bad 
taste the Jew comes by as a part of his Orien- 
tal inheritance — the Turk similarly fattens his 
women with all kinds of sweetmeats and suets. 
On account of this vicious taste among too 
many Jews, one often sees women of hideous 
corpulence at thirty who were types of ideal 
beauty at sixteen. Flesh is a good thing, but 
the Jew should not seek to suffocate himself in 
it, like Clarence in his Malmsey butt. Certes, 
it was not for an excess of "adipose tissue" 
that the Royal Poet named his love the rose 
of Sharon and the lily of the valleys. 

Let the Jewish woman, therefore, vigilantly 
cherish the wonderful beauty which has come 
down to her from those historic sisters of her 



THE SONG THAT IS SOLOMON'S 239 

race whom kings desired with a passion that 
kindled the land to war, whom prophets and 
sages glorified, with whom heroes and mar- 
tyrs walked and concerning whom God Him- 
self has written many of the best pages in His 
own Book. Let her keep as near as she can to 
the ideal of loveliness which the great king, 
drunk with beauty and rapture, pictured thou- 
sands of years ago in the lineaments of his 
Beloved; — 

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet and thy 
speech is comely; thy temples are like a piece 
of pomegranate within thy locks. 

Thy two breasts are like two young roes 
that are twins which feed among the lilies. 

Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honey 
comb; honey and milk are under thy tongue 
and the smell of thy garments is as the smell 
of Lebanon. 

Thy neck is like a tower of ivory. Thine 
head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of 
thine head like purple : the king is held in the 
galleries. How fair and how pleasant art 
thou, O love, for delights ! 



XVIII 

IN PRAISE OF LIFE 

I HAVE to thank the many loyal friends 
who gave me their sympathy and support 
during an Illness that cut nearly three 
months out of my working calendar and sus- 
pended two Issues of The Papyrus."^ To have 
learned that there Is such a stock of pure kind- 
ness In the world, Is worth even the price I 
paid for It. 

The desire of life prolongs it, say the doc- 
tors. 'TIs true, and when the wish for life 
gets its force from the strong motive of doing 
one's chosen work In the only world we surely 
know, then Is Death drlveo back and to Life 
goes the victory. 

Oh! Life, Life, how much better art thou 
than the shadowy hope of an existence beyond 
the grave ! I can hold thee, taste thee, drink 
thee, wrap myself in thee — thou art a most 
dear reality and not a shadow. I kneel before 

* April and May, 1904. 
240 



IN PRAISE OF LIFE 241 

thee and proclaim myself more than ever thy 
true lover, believer and worshipper. Let me 
still be a joyous living pagan and I will not 
change with all the saints that have spurned 
thee and gone their pale way to Nothingness. 
I breathe thy warm, perfumed air as one newly 
escaped from the ante-chamber of Death. It 
is the last week of May — sweet May, I had 
thought never to see thee again! — and the 
whole world is fragrant with lilac. It is an 
efflorescence of life and hope and joy, Nature's 
largess after the dearth and desolation of win- 
ter. My soul is inundated with the golden 
waves of light and warmth arid melody. Some- 
thing of the sweetness and vague longing of 
adolescence revives in my breast. My heart 
trembles with a sudden memory of old loves, a 
memory called up by the sunshine and lilac 
scents and bird music with which the glad 
world is running over. Youth smiles a sly 
challenge at me, and Love holds forth his in- 
effable promise. I am drunk with the rapture 
of May — for I live ... I live ... I live ! 

Henley the brave, who not long ago cap- 
tained his soul out into the Infinite, was moved 
by his experiences in hospital to write some of 



242 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

his most striking poems. No doubt there is 
matter enough for a poignant sort of poetry 
in the House of Sickness. But literary inspira- 
tion fails a man when both his mind and body 
are disintegrating. I have brought nothing 
from my white nights in the hospital, but I 
left there a good deal of myself corporeally, 
and something, as I am admonished by a pres- 
ent difficulty in writing — of my admirable liter- 
ary style. I think with pain and shame of the 
utter weakness to which I was then reduced, 
and I wince at the recollection of some con- 
cessions wrung from dismantled nature. I do 
not care to reflect upon the long blank hours 
or days, or weeks, during which I kept my bed 
in passive endurance, or upon one terrible night 
when I waited for what seemed to be the End 
with such courage as I could command. Ac- 
cording to the Christian precept, I should have 
seen in all this the hand of chastening and 
meekly accepted the portion dealt out to me. 
But had I yielded to this comfortable sort of 
spiritual cowardice, I should probably not be 
alive to tell the story. Many good Christians 
are thus soothed out of this weary life into a 
better world, for a mental attitude of pious 
resignation is the hardest condition with which 



IN PRAISE OF LIFE 243 

the doctor has to contend and an unrivalled 
fattener of graveyards. 

In the next room to mine was a fine young 
man who had undergone an operation for ap- 
pendicitis. The nurses told me there was no 
hope for him, as he had been brought in too 
late — the nurses never contradict the doctors. 
Poor fellow, I could hear his every sigh and 
groan in the vain but heroic struggle he was 
making for life. Presently a stout clean-shaven 
man in clerical garb passed my door: it was 
the minister. He remained about ten minutes 
with the young man, who was a member of his 
church. When he left I watched from my win- 
dow and saw him mount his bicycle and ride 
away. He did not return. The young man 
died next day. I made up my mind more de- 
cidedly that I would get better. 

As a boy I used to read in my prayer book 
the supplication against the "evil of sudden 
death". In this is contained the very essence 
of the Christian idea, since death being synony- 
mous with judgment, must needs appear terri- 
ble to the soul unprepared. Indeed, a sudden 
death in the case of an irreligious person is 
always hailed as a judgment by people of strict 



244 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

piety. On the other hand, the favor of heaven 
is shown by the grace of a long sickness with its 
leisure for repentance and spiritual amend- 
ment. No picture is so edifying in a religious 
sense as that of the repentant sinner, over 
whom we are told there is more rejoicing in 
heaven than is called forth by the triumph of 
the just. Especially if the sinner have repented 
barely in time to be saved — that is the crucial 
point. If he should make his peace too soon, 
or if his repentance should come tardy off, it is 
not difficult to fancy the angels cheated of their 
due excitement. Such a blunderer would, I 
imagine, get more celestial kicks than compli- 
ments. God help us ! — I fear me these death- 
bed repentances are the sorriest farce acted in 
the sight of heaven. 

Yet farcical as they are, religion owes to 
them a great part of its dominion over the 
conscience of men. The Catholic faith, in par- 
ticular, has invested the final repentance and 
absolution with a potency of appeal which few 
indeed are able to withstand. That is the 
meaning of the phrase, "Once a Catholic, al- 
ways a Catholic". And there is doubtless a 
grandeur subduing the imagination in the 
proud position of the Church, that no soul need 



IN PRAISE OF LIFE 245 

be lost which has ever known her sacraments. 
Whatever the cold reason may make of this 
assumption, we may not forget how much it 
has contributed to the peace and consolation of 
humanity. 

As for myself, having had two long and 
desperate sicknesses in the course of a half- 
dozen years, — having been so near the Veil 
which hides the Unknown that I could have 
touched it, — my prayer now and forever shall 
be: Lord, deny us not the blessing of sudden 
death. Even as quickly as Thou pleasest, call 
us hence, O Lord ! 

To be at home once more in mine own place, 
to sit under the cheerful lamp with pipe and 
book, to taste the small honors of domestic 
sovereignty, to look forward with a quiet hope 
to the morrow's task, to watch the happy faces 
of the children in whom my youth renews it- 
self, and to share the peace of her who has so 
long partnered my poor account of joy and 
sorrow — all this is a blessedness which I feel 
none the less that I do not weary a benign 
Providence with fulsome praise. 

Many pious works have been written on the 
incomparable advantage of being dead, — that 



246 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

is, on the superior felicity of the life to come. 
The most eloquent and convincing of these 
macabre essays were composed by a set of men 
who had resigned nearly all that makes life 
dear to humanity. It is enough to say that they 
knew not love, the most powerful tie that at- 
taches us to life. On this account their valu- 
able works no longer enjoy the great popu- 
larity which they had in a simpler time. In- 
deed, the decline of this religious Cult of Death 
is one of the marks of an advancing civiliza- 
tion. No doubt it served a humane purpose in 
those dark centuries which we call the Ages of 
Faith, when life was far more cruel than it 
now is for the mass of mankind. Amid con- 
stant wars, bloodshed, oppression, famine, and 
their attendant evils, from which only a privi- 
leged few were exempt, what wonder that men 
turned eagerly to a gospel which to us seems 
charged with despair? So the ages of history 
during which Hell was most completely and 
perfectly realized on this earth, were also 
those in which faith in Heaven and the Church 
was universal. But with the slow growth of 
liberty and the partial emancipation of the 
human conscience during the past three centu- 
ries, there has gradually been formed a truer 



IN PRAISE OF LIFE 247 

and better appreciation of life. The Cult of 
Death has lost its hold upon the masses, with 
the dissolution of the old terrible dogma of 
eternal punishment. Men are more in love 
with life at this day than ever in the past — 
with life, and love, and happiness, and free- 
dom, all of which were more or less limited 
and tabooed in the blessed Ages of Faith. As 
Heine said, "Men will no longer be put off 
with promissory notes upon Heaven — they de- 
mand their share of this earth, God's beautiful 
garden". ... 

Let us have life, and ever more life I 



XIX 

THE FORBIDDEN WAY 

I AM asked if, in my opinion, suicide is ever 
justifiable. 
^ The question is one for the individual 
conscience. Men and women are answering it 
with a dreadful yea, yea, every day, casting 
away life as they might reject a worn-out gar- 
ment. 

By social consent, founded on religious feel- 
ing, suicide is a crime against God. It is also 
held to be a crime against society. Persons 
attempting suicide and failing in the act are 
subject to the rigor of the law. No legal pun- 
ishment is (of course) provided for those who 
succeed, but they do not escape in the next 
world — the churches take care of that: all 
theologians agree that the suicide is eternally 
reprobate and damned. 

I dissent utterly from this inhuman teaching, 
while I can conceive of no circumstances that 

would make suicide justifiable for myself. For 

248 



THE FORBIDDEN WAY 249 

so dissenting I shall be told that I render my- 
self liable to damnation. Is it not strange that 
a man should be damned for holding too favor- 
able an opinion of God? 

But it may not be so bad as that — we have 
only some men's word for it! 

We are told that hardly a soul comes into 
the world but at some time or other thinks of 
voluntarily quitting it, and is only restrained 
by the fear of eternal punishment. 

I would change this — I would make life here, 
present, hopeful and abundant, the restraining 
influence. I would pit Life against Death and 
turn my back on the kingdom of shadows. 

I do not defend suicide, but I plead for the 
many upon whom fate imposes this bitter des- 
tiny. 

For myself I believe that life at the very 
worst is too precious a gift to throw away. 
Steep me in shame and sorrow to the very lips, 
exile me from the charity of my kind, pile on 
my bare head all the abuses and humiliations 
which human nature is capable of inflicting or 
enduring — my cry shall still and ever be for 
life, more life! 

Though the wife of my youth should betray 
me again and again, though my children prove 



250 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

false and dishonor my gray hairs, though my 
oldest, truest friends abandon me and I be- 
come a "fixed figure for the time of scorn to 
point his slow unmoving finger at", — still shall 
I cHng to this boon of life — life — life ! 

For now I tell you, heart-burdened, weary 
and despairing ones, if only you will be patient 
a little longer and wait, life itself shall heal 
your every sorrow. 

I give you this Gospel of Hope, this water 
of refreshing in the arid desert of your de- 
spair 

Life is the Healer, Life the Consoler, Life 
the Reconciler! 

In earlier years I used to hear the most elo- 
quent sermons on the blessedness of death, 
which always left me cold and unpersuaded. 
To such gloomy homilies is perhaps due the 
aversion I now feel toward most preaching. 
No I talk not to me of death, that ironic Phan- 
tom, that grisly Sophist by whose aid religion 
maintains the unworthiest part of its conquest. 
I hate and abominate from my deepest soul this 
plausive, solemn, unctuous, lying cant of dark- 
ness and the grave. He that preaches fears 
it as much as he that hears, and will move 



THE FORBIDDEN WAY 251 

heaven and earth to escape the inevitable doom. 
Away with such mummery ! 

Death in the ripe course of nature is beau- 
tiful and seemly, but death by disease, or vio- 
lence, or accident, is horrible, for no man 
should be cheated or cheat himself of his due 
share of life. And this which is now an empty 
axiom shall one day be the highest law of a 
better state of society than we yet dream of, 
wherein disease shall be unknown and death 
by violence, public, private, or judicial, a thing 
without precedent. 

My cry is for life — more life ! 

Look, ye impatient ones — I, too, have been 
down, down, down in those abysmal depths 
where hope is a mockery and the mercy of God 
despaired of; I have tasted the bitterness of 
betrayal by those most sacredly pledged to 
keep faith with me; I have known the utter- 
most treason of the heart; I have been made 
to feel that there was not one soul in all the 
living world joined to me by any true or lasting 
bond; I have seen the destruction of my own 
house of life, that temple of the soul, losing 
which a man is homeless on the earth. 

And yet I rose out of this lowest hell of deso- 
lation, borne as I must believe by some late- 



252 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

succoring, strong-winged Angel of Hope — and 
blessed God to see again the cheerful face of 
life! 

Little children, little children, the end of all 
will come only too soon: why hasten it? The 
Master of Life has bidden you wait His sum- 
mons. By my soul ! I do not believe that He 
would harshly reprove you or turn away His 
face should you, under the goad of sorrows too 
great for endurance, come suddenly, unbidden, 
before Him. Yet were it better to stand firm 
like good soldiers and abide your call. 

In other words, you are not to accept defeat. 
It is not that I would brand as coward the man 
who boldly pushes his way into the Unknown — 
the courage of that act is so appalling that men 
have named it madness. But it is a higher 
courage to resist the fates. 

Yet — whisper ! — I do not find It hard to be- 
lieve that often God in His mercy shows this 
only way, this via dolorosa, to some poor lost 
soul, some victim of man's inhumanity, unable 
to struggle longer in the coils of fate. 

To me the most awfully pathetic figure in a 
world sown with tragedy is the man or woman, 
broken on the cruel rack of life, who makes a 
desperate choice to find his or her way alone to 



THE FORBIDDEN WAY 253 

God. Though you plant no cross and raise no 
stone upon that grave, though you hide it away 
from the sight of men, I for one shall not deem 
it a grave of shame. I shall kneel there in spite 
of priestly anathemas; I shall pray for this 
poor child of earth sainted by suffering; my 
tears shall fall on the despised grave where 
rests, — oh, rests well at last, — one of the un- 
counted martyrs of humanity. Yes ! I see in 
that nameless grave huddled away in the pot- 
ter's field a symbol of the tragedy of this life 
whereunto we are called without our will and 
whence we must not depart save in the process 
of nature. And I will believe that God re- 
jects the poor defeated one lying there when 
I, a mere human father, feel my heart turned 
to stone against the weakest and most erring 
of my children. 



XX 

GLORIA MUNDI 

HAVE you ever really thought upon the 
beauty of this world which is passing 
away before your eyes? You have 
read the words, "The eye is not satisfied with 
seeing nor the ear with hearing", but have you 
ever thought that they might bear another 
sense than the Holy Book gives them? 

For my part, when I come to die I know 
what my chief regret will be. Not for my poor 
human sins, which have really hurt nobody save 
myself and most of which I will have forgot- 
ten. Not because I have missed the laurel 
which was the darling dream of my youth. 
Not because I have always fallen short of my 
ideal and, still worse, betrayed my own dear- 
est hopes. Not for the selfish reason that I 
have never been able to gain that position of 
independence and security which would enable 
me to work with a free mind. Not for having 
failed to score in any one particular what the 
254 



GLORIA MUNDI 255 

world calls a success. Not for these nor any 
other of the vain desires that mock the human 
heart in its last agony. 

No; I shall simply be sorry that I failed to 
enjoy so much of the beauty of this dear earth 
and sky, or even to mark it in my hurry through 
the days, my reckless pleasures, my stupid tasks 
that yielded me nothing. I shall think with 
utter bitterness of the time out of all the time 
given me I might have passed in profitably 
looking at the moon. Or in marking with an 
eye faithful to every sign, the advance of the 
bannered host of Summer unto the scattered 
and whisthng disarray of Autumn. How many 
of those wonderful campaigns have I really 
seen? — alas! I know too well how many I 
have numbered. 

There was a rapture of flowing water that 
always I was promising myself I should one 
day explore to the full; and now I am to die 
without knowing it. There were days and 
weeks and months of the universe in all its 
glory bidding for my admiration; yet I saw 
nothing of it all. My baser senses solicited 
me beyond the cosmic marvels. I lost in hours 
of sleep, or foolish pleasure, or useless labor, 
spectacles of beauty which the world had been 



2s6 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

storing up for millions of ages — perhaps had 
not been able to produce before my brief day. 
I regret even the first years of life when the 
universe seemed only a pleasant garden to play 
in and the firmament a second roof for my fa- 
ther's house. Grown older but no wiser, I 
planned to watch the sky from dawn to sunset 
and, on another occasion, from sunset to dawn; 
but my courage or patience failed me even for 
this poor enterprise. I was a beggar at a feast 
of incomparable riches, and something always 
detained me from putting forth my hand; or I 
left the table which the high gods had spread 
and went eating husks with swine. And now I 
am to die hungry, self-robbed of my share at 
the banquet of immortal beauty — can Christian 
penitence find anything to equal the poignancy 
of such a regret? . . . 

Yet even as I write I am cheating myself in 
the old bankrupt fashion, for the day outside 
my window is like a tremulous golden fire, and 
the world overflows with a torrent of green life 
— life that runs down from the fervid heaven 
and suspires through the pregnant earth. It is 
the first of June, when Nature, like a goddess 
wild with the pangs of delivery, moves the 
whole earth with her travail, filling every 



GLORIA MUNDI 257 

bosom with the sweet and cruel pain of desire. 
Now she takes account of nothing that does 
not fecundate, conceive or produce, intent only 
upon securing her own immortal life. And 
though she has done this a million and a mil- 
lion ages, yet is she as keen of zest as ever; as 
avid for the full sum of her desire as when she 
first felt the hunger of love and life; as un- 
wearied as on the morning of Creation. 

"Put away your foolish task," she seems to 
say. "Yet a few days and it and you will both 
be ended and forgotten. Come out of doors 
and live, while the chance is left you. Come 
and learn the secret of the vital sap that is no 
less a marvel in the tiniest plant than in the 
race of man. If you can not learn that, I will 
teach you something else of value — the better 
that you ask me naught. Leave your silly 
books and come into the great green out-of- 
doors, swept clean by the elemental airs. Here 
shall you find the answer to your foolish ques- 
tion, 'What do we live for?' — Life . . . life 
. . . lifel" 



XXI 

THE SPRING 

IT IS the Spring again. 
Not merely by the calendar, dear chil- 
dren of mine own age, but also, I would 
hope, by your hearts : to that Spring let us say 
our word of welcome. 

I am writing on an early day in March. It 
is still Winter, so far as snow and blow, mere 
scenic illusion, goes : but a certain voiceless 
promise in the air unclothes the landscape of 
its remaining rigors and makes mock at the 
weather man's predictions. With the Spring at 
our doors we shall laugh to scorn the utmost 
rage of Boreas. Let him do his worst — he 
must go, and quickly tool 

Yet I was not mindful of the Spring (for 
my thoughts were on a less cheerful business) 
until coming home t'other evening I noticed the 
lengthening of our brief twilight, — as if the day 
had been pulled out one stop; and standing to 
look at the sky, with its unwonted clear space 
258 



THE SPRING 259 

of radiance, there came a rush of vernal airs 
about my forehead, and I felt the fulness of the 
Spring within my heart. 

Oh, may the Spring ever so come to me ! . . . 

Now though a man may not be so learned 
as Solomon In what some other Inspired writer 
has called the "signs of Spring", — though he 
be indeed but a humble suburbanite and un- 
blest amphibian, neither of city nor country, 
he may feel that the sun 'gins to be hot on the 
back along about noon. May see that the snow, 
melting off, leaves ] ong pools in the road and 
common which give a cheerful brightness under 
the Spring sun. May note that the cock crows 
oftener and with a more resonant pipe than In 
the gray Winter dawns; that the sap Is rising 
in the willow and maple, and the pioneer robin 
shows his red breast among the sparrows' 
brown. May mark within himself a stirring of 
sensations and desires long dormant as though 
the old Adam had turned In his sleep. May 
be conscious of that Indefinable sense of expec- 
tancy brooding over all things betwixt earth 
and heaven, which heralds the rebirth of the 
year. 

The Spring in truth has a tale of its own, 
and not the same tale for every man — like lov^ 



26o AN ATTIC DREAMER 

itself, ever the same, yet ever different. But 
of all its messages and portents I chiefly prize 
that strange quickening of the pulse, that 
fleeting, unaccountable rapture of the heart, 
that feeling as though one were at times an 
EEolian harp played upon by mysterious airs, — 
a reed through which all things blow to music, 
— until you actually have to stop now and again 
when walking out-of-doors, the ravishment and 
delight of it being more than you can bear. 

If you do not so feel the Spring, there is, I 
fear, no Spring for you. 

No season discourseth so wisely and witch- 
ingly to the heart; none hath so much of that 
poignant, unutterable poetry for which all the 
poets have tuned their harps in vain. Most 
ancient of deceivers, her cuckoo note is aye 
potent to befool the world — not a wound, not 
a pang, not a sorrow is remembered in the heal- 
ing smile of Spring. 

The truth is, we are never so much in love 
with life as in the Spring. It involves the 
whole of life — a man counts his Springs, not 
his Winters or Summers. It is Nature's renew- 
al and confirmation of her old promise to us, 
which each interprets in a jealous way he would 
not dare confess to his neighbor. How she 



THE SPRING 261 

cheats us, and how we love the cheat ! For let 
us but admit her subtle witchery a moment, and 
then (as sweet William hath it) our 

"state, 
Like to the lark at break of day arising 
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's 
gate!" 

Bankrupt in hope indeed is he to whom the 
Spring doth not fetch a new bravery of spirit, 
urging him to try another and a gayer hazard 
of fortune. Sick of a truth is he whose feeble 
lungs crow not with a specious health in these 
enchanted airs. Dim is the eye that fails to 
mark the cheerful lengthening of the days. 
Cold and dead the heart in which the Spring 
awakes not a dream of love. 

As a man turns into middle life (sorely 
against his will) I think he is apt, on looking 
back, to regret chiefly the Springs he has left 
behind. If there were to be a seasonal restitu- 
tion, I can promise for one man at least, that 
he would prefer certain Springs to a more than 
equal count of Summers. Early Springs I 
mean, of course; the wonder and romance of 
which pursue us as with a vain regret during 
all our after-life, so that we seem to be con- 



262 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

stantly seeking the clew to some beautiful and 
marvellous story but half revealed to us in a 
dream. 

For, in truth, the enchantment of those 
Springs, the loveliness and mystery and desire 
of them, deepen the more the farther we go 
back into our youth, until they seem but a con- 
fused yet delightful blowing of merry winds 
and a mere hide-and-seek of frolic sunshine; 
beyond which Garden of Faery it is forbidden 
to pass. 

Why a man should be more concerned to 
remember and treasure up his early Springs 
than his early Summers, this old child con- 
fesses himself unable to say. 

But so he feels, without knowing the reason; 
and now more than ever, since the Spring hath 
again laid her hand upon him. 



XXII 

THE FIRST LOVE 

In dreams she grows not older 
The lands of dream among, 

Though all the world wax colder, 
Though all the songs he sung; 

In dreams doth he behold her 
Still fair and kind and young. 

Andrew Lang 

A MAN never forgets his first love, how- 
ever early in life it may have come to 
him; through all the ensuing years he 
bears this precious blue flower of the heart. 
Even amid the storms of later passion, or the 
tranquil joys of an assured love, it keeps its 
unseen, mysterious, marvellous life. However 
the heart may burn, it still has dew enough for 
this unfading blossom; however happy and 
content it may be in another love, yet has it a 
secret longing which only this can appease. 

Aye, though the heart itself be as a temple 
263 



264 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

consecrated to another woman, where Love as 
a priest offers perpetual sacrifice, yet shall you 
find, deep hidden within its shrine of shrines, a 
tiny white pyx holding the sacred Host, the 
imperishable dream of the first passion. . . . 
Is it not astonishing how early we begin to 
love, — as if Nature had no other use for us? 
I can scarcely remember a time, however dis- 
tant in my childhood, when I was not in love 
with somebody. Ah, do not think those ear- 
liest troubles of the heart are to be smiled at 
as children's play. Innocent though they were, 
what exquisite sweet pain they caused us! 
What cruel unhappiness, since to be young and 
unhappy seems a special malignancy of fate! 
What ineffable longings, that our childish 
minds vainly sought to understand! What 
torments of jealousy, which the storms of ma- 
ture passion have been impotent to efface ! 

Mamie ! The name will never lose its magic 
for me, and to the end it will continue to be 
whispered from my dreams. And to think I 
have now a daughter older than she was when 
I first saw and loved her. O time the inexor- 
able! . . . 

She was twelve and I was sixteen when we 



THE FIRST LOVE 265 

tasted together the poignant sweets of young 
passion, the delicious fruit of that one forbid- 
den tree in the earthly Eden which to eat and 
enjoy, humanity will ever gladly face exile and 
death. 

Yet Mamie was only a little girl just entering 
her teens, though developed like a child ma- 
donna, and, as I was to know, with feelings 
beyond her years. I have never seen anything 
like the proud beauty of her face with its glori- 
ous hazel eyes, rich brown and red cheek like 
a ripe fruit, and scarlet sensitive mouth, all 
framed in a setting of dark auburn hair. 

I pause to smile a little at this fervid de- 
scription, but you will understand that I am 
trying to look into the Boy's heart and to write 
what I find there. That this Fairy Princess of 
love was only a little household drudge, kept 
from school and slaving all day for her large 
German mother married the second time to a 
small German tailor, who had by this said 
mother a younger daughter of his own, for 
whom he evinced an unpleasing preference, — 
these things may hold well enough together in 
a world of hard facts, but the Boy saw them 
through the lens of his romantic imagination. 
And so complete was the illusion that after 



266 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

more than twenty-five years the Man cannot 
easily shake it off. 

The very beginning of it I can't remember — 
perhaps we never do recall those first obscure 
intimations of a passion. I have a delicious 
but confused memory of long evening walks 
with her and the little sister — she, as I recol- 
lect with an old pang, was nearly always with 
us. It was summer and the place was an old 
New England town with a narrow river 
spanned by quaint bridges flowing through the 
midst of it. I have known love since, — ah me ! 
— and real passion, the kind that consumes a 
man's life as flame licks up oil; but never again 
have I known anything to compare with that 
young dream. 

Crossing one of these bridges on a certain 
evening sacred to the angels of Memory and 
Joy, the little sister stopped behind not more 
than a minute to tie her shoe; and we had our 
first kiss! (The Man trembles at the remem- 
brance.) I did not ask for it — I feared her, 
that is, loved her too much; and she knew no 
more of coquetry than a babe. So far as I can 
be sure, the impulse was at once mutual, 
natural and irresistible. O clinging dewy 
mouth! O young heart fluttering wildly 



THE FIRST LOVE 267 

against mine ! — when have I ever drunk at so 
pure a fount of joy! . . . 

After that our evening walks were mostly 
made up of kisses, for the little sister (she 
was nine) had to be let into the secret, and as 
I recall with some surprise, she never betrayed 
us. This was the more to her credit, seeing 
that she was only a half-sister and the favorite 
child. But not even a little girl of nine can 
bear to see another getting all the kisses, and so 
she would be vexed sometimes and cry pet- 
tishly, "Oh kiss, kiss ! — why don't you get 
married?" Then I would appease her with 
candy or a promise of something nice, — and 
we would enjoy our subsequent kisses all the 
more for the little interruption. O far years, 
wafting to me a faint scent of lilac ! O youth 
that is no more ! . . . 

This lasted a whole summer, — the only en- 
tire season, the Man freely admits, that he ever 
passed in Paradise. Could he now go back 
through the crowding years, I am very sure 
that he would make a bee-line for that old New 
England town, and with a heart thumping in 
his throat, look for a beloved little figure on 
one of the quaint bridges in the summer 
gloaming. 



268 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Here the Boy tugs at my sleeve and asks me 
not to tell the prosaic occasion of those twi- 
light walks with Mamie and little sister; the 
same being that the little tailor sent them every 
night but Sunday (ah, those heart-hungry Sun- 
day nights!) for a pint of beer, and often 
chided them for bringing it home flat. He, the 
Boy, is quite sullen when I try to make him 
understand that this homely detail but adds to 
the pathos of his romance. Stubborn Boy in- 
deed . . . and the Man not so much better! 

I had to leave the little town at the end of 
that summer of love, and so suddenly that 
there was no chance to bid her good-bye. Once 
again, and only once, I saw her afterward, 
when about two years later I visited the place. 
On our dear bridge, too, and with little sister 
grown formidably larger and more knowing. 
She came defiantly between us at once, and I 
saw with a sinking heart that we dared not re- 
new the old love-making. Mamie was taller, 
paler and, as I thought, — I mean the Boy, — 
lovely as an angel. I scarcely remember a word 
that she said to me — the constraint of the sis- 
ter's presence checked us both. I think she was 
chilled too by the fact that my visit was to 
be only for a few days; and she doubtless real- 



THE FIRST LOVE 269 

ized the truth, that I was passing out of her 
life. Never have I been more wretched than 
during that last walk with Mamie. 

On leaving her I mustered up my courage 
and ignoring little sister, whose eyes were 
bright with malice, offered to kiss her. She 
turned her cheek toward me, saying calmly: 
"I am going to be confirmed on Sunday". 

That cold kiss is my last memory of Mamie, 
of the warm loving child-woman whose mere 
name, seen or heard, causes my heart to thrill 
as when a boy. I never saw her again. . . . 

Where is she now? God knows: yet in no 
worse place, I trust, than that consoling heaven 
of our dreams where the precious things of 
the heart that we have lost in our journey 
through life are restored to us; and most dear 
and precious of all, our first love. 



XXIII 

SEEING THE OLD TOWN 

I'VE been back seeing the old town. The 
old town where I served the first years of 
my hard apprenticeship to life — alas! not 
yet completed. The old town where, as a boy, 
I dreamed those bright early dreams whose 
fading into gray futility makes the dull burden 
of every man's regret. 

It may be that my dreams were more varied 
and fantastic than those of the average 
younker, for I was the fool o' fancy, with a 
poet's wild heart in my breast. God knows 
what I promised myself in that long-vanished 
time of youth which yet was instantly vivified 
and present to me as I trod the streets of the 
old town. I felt like one about to see a ghost 
— the ghost of my young self ; and I shrank 
consciously from meeting it, with this bitter- 
sweet pang of disillusion at my heart. I could 
not more sensibly have feared a living presence. 

Alas, what one of us all is worthy, after the 
270 



SEEING THE OLD TOWN 271 

heavy account of years, to confront the ghost 
of his candid youth ? — what one but must bow 
the head before that pitying yet reproachful 
Memory? 

This feeling took such strong hold upon 
me that soon I hastened away from the too fa- 
miliar squares and corners, so poignantly rem- 
iniscent of that other Me, and went to the 
hotel facing Main Street. But even here, 
seated at a window and elbowed by a group of 
story-swapping drummers, I could not free my- 
self from the spell of old memories. Youth 
with its hundred voices cried to me; the past 
and the present became at once strangely con- 
fused, yet separable; and I was set to the pain- 
ful task of tracing and identifying my younger 
self in the crowd of passers-by. 

And I did find that boy again — oh yes I I 
did find him in spite of the lapse of many 
changing years and all that Time had wrought 
within and without me since he and I were one. 
I found him, though he was long shy and hesi- 
tated to come out of the shadows; holding back 
timidly and looking on me with tender yet 
doubtful eyes — ah God! I knew whence the 
doubt. But at last he came fully, careless of 
the roaring drummers or knowing himself to 



272 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

be unseen; and I held his hand in mine, while 
a sweet sorrow beat against my heart in the 
thought of what might have been and now 
could never be. And after the kind relief of 
tears, we talked in whispers a long time there 
by the window, no one noticing us; and ere he 
went back into the shadow he touched my fore- 
head lightly with his lips, leaving me as one 
whom God has assoiled. . . . 

The old town was but little changed, only it 
seemed smaller, like all places we have known 
in our youth and been long absent from. The 
Main street, where the working boys and girls 
flirt and promenade in an endless chain, still 
slouched the whole length of the town, with the 
railroad between it and the river; no difference, 
except that it was better paved than in my time, 
and the clanging trolleys ran instead of the 
ancient bob-tailed horse cars. There were a 
few new shops or strange names over the old 
ones — no other changes of consequence. The 
same old town! — the boy of twenty years ago 
would not have been phased in the least. 

But I was, and the fact was due to the 
changes which Time had written upon so many 
faces I had known ; fair young girls turned into 
full-blown matrons, vaunting their offspring 



SEEING THE OLD TOWN 273 

with no lack of words, or withered old maids 
looking askance and shrinking from recogni- 
tion ; striplings who had shot up into solid man- 
hood, and whom you were puzzled to place; 
broken old men whom you recalled in their 
vigorous prime; all the varied human derelicts 
of the storm and stress of twenty years. Oh, it 
makes a man bethink himself to watch the pro- 
cession go by in the old town. 

Certainly, if you wish to get a true line on 
yourself, go back to the .old town. Nothing 
else will do the trick. Your glass is a liar 
leagued with your vanity. Your wife a loving 
flatterer who says the thing that is not. Your 
children will never tell you how old you are 
beginning to look. Your daily intimates and 
coevals are concerned to keep up the same illu- 
sion for themselves. You deceive yourself, 
know it, and are happy in the deception. There 
is only one way for you to learn the "bitter, 
wholesome truth", or, in other words, to get a 
fair look at the clock — go back to the old 
town! 

There is some humor, too, in going back, as 
I find from my visits at an interval of five or 
six years. Always I am most heartily and 
noisily greeted by men who have no use for me 



274 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

except to "knock" me, whom the sight or sound 
of my name exasperates, to whom my tiny bit 
of success is poison, and who struggle on 
bravely with the hope of seeing me finally land 
where I deserve to be and am, as they fervently 
believe, irretrievably headed. We do each 
other good, for if I were to die, these men 
would lose one of the sweetest motives of their 
existence ; and I, knowing this, am eager to live 
on and disappoint them. 

Last time I went back I saw one of these 
friendly fellows at a distance of a block, and 
he kept his glad hand out at the risk of paraly- 
sis, until we came together. Then how he 
laughed with pleasure, and my goodness, what 
a grip he gave me! I had to laugh with him 
and return his grip, so far as my feeble strength 
would allow. In an acquaintance of over 
twenty years this fellow had never offered me 
the slightest proof of his friendship, save, as 
I have said, to "knock" me; and now a dear 
friend of mine hung modestly back while he 
crushed me in his iron embrace. When I was 
going away at the end of my visit, this terrible 
enemy came to the nine o'clock train to see me 
off and spoiled the leave-taking of my real 
friends. There is irony of the same brand 



SEEING THE OLD TOWN 275 

elsewhere, but you will not see it to such naked 
advantage as in the old town. . . . 

The saddest experience one can have in re- 
visiting the old town is to hear suddenly of the 
death of some friend of one's youth, who 
though separated from one by long years of 
absence, must ever share in the romance of that 
enchanted period. I was so to learn of the loss 
of a friend who had been very dear to me in the 
old days. Together we had trudged the Main 
Street of the old town, by night and by day, 
making plans for the future, few of which were 
realized either for him or for me. 

The friendships of youth are sacred. Ma- 
ture life has nothing to offer in their place. 
Men agree to like each other for social or busi- 
ness reasons; often, paradoxically, because they 
fear each other. The heart is not touched in 
this hollow alliance — it is a pact of interest and 
selfishness. Youth and trust, age and cynicism 
— thus are they paired. 

I know well that one or two young friend- 
ships or frank elections of the heart have 
yielded me much of the pain and thrill and 
rapture of that sentiment between the sexes 
which we call love. I know that I was several 
years older ere the voice of a girl had leave to 



276 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

thrill me like the tone of this dear lost friend; 
that I suffered as keenly during an occasional 
boyish miff with him as in my first genuine love 
quarrels ; that I would have risked life and limb 
to please him, and could conceive of nothing 
sweeter than his praise; that I can not think 
of him even now without a pain at the heart 
which I have not the skill to analyze. And 
though I saw little of him for many years, and 
there was no attempt to follow up our ancient 
friendship — our paths lying wide apart in every 
sense — and though he died a man of middle 
age, I can but think of him — taking no note at 
all of the years that lie between — as a bright- 
haired, laughing youth ; and so mourn him with 
a sorrow of the heart which proves a silent 
witness there during all the years to the truth 
of our early affection. 

There is something divine, though we but 
dimly glimpse it, in the unavowed, almost un- 
conscious persistence of these sacred ties of our 
youth, these precious legacies from the days 
that are no more, whose light shines with a 
white lustre that belongs to them alone. 

Sleep well, my friend 1 . . . 

I was not sorry to have seen the old town 
again, though it gave me but a sad pleasure at 



SEEING THE OLD TOWN 277 

best, and I was glad when my short leave was 
up. And yet that singular thrill of walking 
where once you knew and were known of every- 
body, and where still, because of some slight 
rumors from the great outlying world, a flatter- 
ing village curiosity attends you, is worth going 
a long journey to feel. 

To say nothing of your joyous enemy who 
hails you with stentorian shout and glad hand 
extended, on your arrival, and likewise dis- 
misses you on your departure with curses not 
loud but deep. And the many things you see 
and hear and feel which, without compliment, 
certify you to yourself as you really are ! 



XXIV 

PULVIS ET UMBRA 

NO sadder message comes to a writer in 
the course of a year than the news of 
some friendly though unknown read- 
er's death. Often you learn it only through 
the return of the magazine, with the single 
word "Deceased" written across the wrapper. 
It is a word to give one pause, however en- 
grossing the present occupation. Here was a 
man or woman who, though personally un- 
known to you, was yet, it may be, in spiritual 
touch with you — perhaps the best friendship 
of all. For him or her you wrote your 
thoughts — since all writing is to an unseen but 
not unfamiliar audience ; for him or her you 
told the story of your own mind and heart, sure 
of a kindly understanding and sympathy — with- 
out this assurance, believe me, there would be 
little enough writing in the world. Every 
writer's message is conditioned — I would al- 
most say dictated — by this invisible but closely 

judging auditory. You get to know what your 
278 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 279 

readers expect, and this in the main you try to 
give them, though often failing the mark. So 
the act of writing is a kind of tacit covenant 
and cooperation between the writer and his 
public. Indeed, it is not I but you who hold 
the pen; dr rather it is I who hold it but you 
who speak through it and through me. 

This relation being understood, it is but 
natural that a writer should feel a sense of 
grief and loss on hearing of the death of some- 
one who held him to this communion of 
thought and spirit. I am not sure that this 
grief would be more genuine had he personally 
known the lost one — our finest friendships, like 
the old classic divinities, veil themselves in a 
cloud. We wear ourselves out trying to main- 
tain the common friendships of the house and 
street, and it is like matching faces with Pro- 
teus: in the end we become indifferent — or 
wise. 

But here was one whom you never saw — who 
lived half the length of the continent from you, 
or perhaps in the next town — no matter, you 
two had never met in the body. Your word 
did, however, come to him and called forth a 
genial response ; he let you know that so far as 
you went he set foot with you. Thencefor- 



28o AN ATTIC DREAMER 

ward, you marched the more boldly, getting 
grace and courage and authority from this 
one's silent friendship and approval. You fig- 
ured him as one who stood afar off — too far 
for you to see his face — and waved you a 
cheery salute; your soul hailed a fellow pil- 
grim. Now comes the word that he can go no 
further with you — rather, indeed, that he has 
outstripped your laggard pace and gone for- 
ward on the great Journey. You learn of his 
departure in the chance way I have mentioned 
— not being a friend in the conventional sense, 
the family do not think to send you any mes- 
sage or mourning card. You have but to feel 
that you are poorer by a friendship of the soul 
than you were yesterday; that you are going 
on, in a sense, alone and unsupported, for this 
friend was a host; that you are not to look ever 
again for his written word of praise, which 
brought such gladness to your heart, or his deli- 
cate counsel that often helped you to a clearer 
vision of things. The silent compact is dis- 
solved. ... 

Life is a blessing, and death is no less. 
That which we call the common lot is the 
rarest lot. Love and loss and grief are for all. 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 281 

Of two men, one who loves and one who has 
loved and lost, the second is the richer: God 
has given him the better part — he holds both 
of earth and Heaven. 

The love that has known no loss is wholly 
selfish and human. Death alone sanctifies. 

Who has not lain down at night saying unto 
himself, "Now is the solemn hour when my 
own shall come back to me", — has not sounded 
the shoreless sea of love. 

I believe in life and I believe not less pro- 
foundly in death. 

I believe in a resurrection and a restoration 
— we can not lose our own. 

No man has ever yet found tongue to tell 
the things that death has taught him. No man 
dare reveal them fully — 'tis a covenant with 
Silence. 

A power that strikes us to our knees with 
infinite sorrow and a yearning that would 
reach beyond the grave, must be a Power 
Benign. 

Life divides and estranges: Death reunites 
and reconciles : Blessed be Death ! 

"Your friend is dead!" they told me, but I 
did not believe nor understand. 



282 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

Then they led me to a darkened room, 
hushed and solemn amid the roar of New 
York, where I saw him lying in a strange yet 
beautiful serenity. 

No disfigurement of his manly comeliness; 
no trace of a struggle that had convulsed the 
watchers with pain only less than his. 

Roses on his manly breast — roses rich and 
lush as the young life that had sunk into a sleep 
so sudden, so unlocked for. 

Nothing to shock, nothing to appal in this 
wordless greeting to the friends of his heart. 
As ever in life, his personality took and held 
us in its strong toil of grace — yes, more than 
ever held us now closely his own. 

Could this indeed be death? 

Ah, many a time had I hastened with joyous 
anticipation to meet him, but never had we kept 
a tryst like this. 

I clasped that hand whose touch so often 
had thrilled me with its kindness — oh, hand so 
strong and gentle of my best-loved friend! 
It was not cold as I feared it would be, and 
surely a pulse answered to mine — he knew, oh, 
yes ! he knew that I was there. 

I kissed his calm forehead and felt no chill 
of death — no terror at the heart. He seemed 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 283 

but to lie in a breathless sleep that yet held a 
profound consciousness of our presence. 

Still, they said he was dead, — he so tranquil, 
almost smiling and inscrutably attentive ! — and 
the grief of women challenged my own tears to 
flow. 

Yet, with my emotions tense as a bow drawn 
to the head, I could not weep ; so was I held by 
this wonder and majesty they called death. 
And it seemed that he did not ask my tears in 
the ineffable peace of our last meeting, — no, 
not my tears. But there was a gathering up of 
the heart which I had never known before, a 
bringing together by Memory, the faithful 
warder, of all that had made or ministered to 
our friendship, — kind looks and tones, trifles 
light as air mingled with graver matters, a 
country walk, a sea voyage, books that we had 
read together, snatches of talk, mutual pleas- 
ures, mutual interests, a hundred proofs of 
brotherly affection and sympathy, — so Memory 
ran searching the years till the sum of my love 
and my loss lay before me. 

Did he know? — did he feel? Scarcely I 
dared to ask myself when the Silence breathed 
Yes! . . . 

Here at my elbow is the telephone into which 



284 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

I could summon his pleasant voice at will. It 
was but now we were talking and making happy 
plans together^ — I had no plans without him. 

Then there was a blank, and a strange voice, 
vibrant with pain, called me up and said. . . . 

Oh, God! — it can not be true! He a giant 
in his youth and strength; he with his vast en- 
joyment of life, every nerve and muscle of him 
trained to the fullest energy; he struck down, 
without a note of warning, in the vigor of his 
triumphant manhood, while the old, the sickly 
and the imperfect live on ? — No, no — this were 
not death, but sacrifice. 

Why, it was but yesterday I felt the vital 
grasp of his hand; listened to his brave talk, so 
genial a reflex of his mind and spirit; basked 
in the brightness of his frank smile, — debtor 
as ever I was to his flowing kindness; drank 
the cordial of his living presence, and took no 
thought of fate. 

And now they tell me he is dead — that from 
our account of life, this long sum of days and 
hours so dreary without him, he is gone for- 
ever ! Over and over must I say this, or hear 
the dull refrain from others; yet the truth will 
not press home. 

For, in spite of the dread certainty, I am not 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 285 

always without hope of seeing him again in the 
pleasant ways of life where often we met to- 
gether; where never we parted but with a joy- 
ous promise soon to meet again. 

This hope would be stronger, I now feel, had 
I not looked upon him in that strange peaceful- 
ness that was yet so compelling; and sometimes 
I wish they had not led me there. 

So hard is it to break with the dear habit of 
life — so reluctant the heart to believe that the 
silver cord has been loosed which bound it to 
another. 

Oh, my lost friend! . . . 

The watchers told me that they had never 
seen so brave a struggle for life. Time and 
again he grappled with the Destroyer, like the 
strong athlete he was — yes, and often it seemed 
that his dauntless heart would prevail. But 
alas I the fates willed otherwise. 

Then at last, when hope was gone, as he 
read in the tearful eyes of those about him, he 
threw up his right hand with a lamentable ges- 
ture, saying, — "That's all!" 

Not all, brave and true heart, for love can 
not lose its own, and thy defeat was still a vic- 
tory. Thou livest now more than ever in the 
memory of those who gave thee love for love, 



286 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

yet ever lacked of thy abounding measure; to 
them shalt thou ever appear as when thou didst 
fall asleep in the glory of thy youth and 
strength; age can not lay its cold hand upon 
thee, and thy beloved, dying old mayhap, shall 
again find thee young. 

In that sweet hope, dear Friend of my heart, 
and until then — farewell, farewell ! 



XXV 

SHADOWS 

WE are shadows all and shadows we 
pursue. This business of life which 
we make-believe to take so earnestly, 
— what is it but a moth-chase or the play of 
grotesques in a child's magic lantern? A sud- 
den helter-skelter of light and shade, a comic 
jumble of figures thrown for a moment on the 
screen, and then, — darkness! 

Children of the shadow, to that Shadow we 
return at last; but the very essence of our life 
is fluid, evanishing always. The minute, the 
day, the hour, the year, — who can lay hands on 
them? — and yet in our humorous fashion we 
speak of these as fixed and stable things, sub- 
ject to our control. Meantime and all time, 
dream delivers us unto dream, while life lends 
to its most tangible aspects something shadowy 
and spectral, as the vapors clothe the horizon 
with mystery. The things we call realities, in 

our vain phrase, that enter most deeply into the 

287 



288 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

warp of our lives, these are also dream-stuff, 
kindred of the Shadow. Our consciousness, 
from which we dare to apprehend immortality, 
can only look backward into the realm of 
dream and shadow, or forward into the realm 
of shadow and dream. I am at this moment 
more stricken at the heart with the sorrow of 
a song that my mother crooned to me, a child, 
in the firelight many years ago, than with all 
the griefs I have since known. Shadows, all 
shadows! With my house full of romping, 
laughing children, there falls now upon my 
heart the tiny shadow of a lost babe — and I 
beat helpless hands against the iron mystery 
of death. . . . 

But the living, too, are shadows, not less 
pitiable than they whom death has taken from 
our sight. Nay, it is more sad to be the shadow 
of a shadow than to clasp the final darkness. 

Tell me, O dear love, where now is the face 
that once showed me all the heaven I cared to 
know, the form that made the rapture of my 
youth, the spell which filled my breast with de- 
licious pain, the lips whose touch so coy, so 
rarely gained, was honey and myrrh and wine ? 
Oh, say not that she, too, is of the Shadow! — 

Nay, she is here at thy side and has never 



SHADOWS 289 

left thee, but is in all things the same — look 
again ! Alas 1 this is not the face that charmed 
my youth, this is not the form that filled my 
dreams — and her eyes were clear as the well- 
springs of Paradise. But oh, for pity of it, let 
not my poor love know that her dear enrap- 
turing self, with our precious dream in which 
we drew down heaven to earth, is gone forever 
into the Shadow. 

We are shadows all, living ghosts, so slight 
of memory and consciousness that we seem to 
die many deaths ere the final one. This illu- 
sion we name life is intermittent- — hardly can 
we recall what happened day before yesterday. 
Even the great events of life (as we phrase 
them) do but feebly stamp our weak conscious- 
ness. By a fiction which everyone knows to 
be false, we make a pretence of feeling much 
and deeply. 'Tis a handsome compliment to 
our common nature, but the truth is we rarely 
feel — our substance Is too thin and ghost-like. 

As shadows we fly by each other and are 
never really in contact. This is the profound de- 
ception of love, the pathos of the human trag- 
edy. The forms we would clasp make them- 
selves thin air; we strain at a vacuum and a 
shade — aye, in the most sacred embraces of love 



290 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

we hold — nothing I Less hard is it to scale the 
walls of heaven than to compass our desire. 
But now at last we are to be satisfied, to have 
our fill of this dear presence which spells for 
us the yearning and mystery of love : — alas ! in 
the very rapture of possession we feel the eter- 
nal cheat. 

Yet while we lament ever that we can not lay 
hands on those we love, shadows that we are, 
no more sure are we of ourselves. This 
shadow of me eludes even myself as I am 
eluded by the shadows of others in the great 
phantasmal show around me. I know this 
shadow of me, volatile, uncertain, ever escap- 
ing from under the hand, and if I were not so 
busy chasing my own shadow — the evanescent 
Me — I should have more leisure for hunting 
other moths and shadows. The old Greeks 
figured this change and fugacity in the mythic 
Proteus ; but they missed the deeper sense of it. 

There was a shadow of me last year that I 
had some cause of quarrel with and we parted 
unkindly. Where is It ? — gone forever. Wiser 
now, I would gladly make peace with that 
shadow — it meant honestly, I must confess, 
though often it sinned and blundered — ^but 
never more will it walk the earth. Other 



SHADOWS 291 

shadows of me have likewise escaped, leaving 
similar accounts unsettled (they never do put 
their affairs in order) — not to be settled now, 
I dare say, until the Great Audit. 

I would not care to recall all those shadows 
of myself, even had I the power, as I would 
not wish to live my life over again without 
leave to change it (he is a fool or a liar who 
says otherwise). But I may confess a weakness 
for One that vanished long ago, leaving me too 
soon : a shadow of youthful hope and high pur- 
pose that could do much to refresh this jaded 
heart, dared I but look upon it. Oh, kind 
Master of the Show, grant me once more to 
see that shadow on the screen! Unworthy as 
I am, let me look on it again and strive to 
gather new hope from its imperishable store. 
I know it dreamed of a holier love than I have 
realized; of nobler aims than I have had 
strength to reach ; of crowns and triumphs that 
I shall never claim. It believed only in good 
(God knows !) and since it left me, without any 
cause that I can remember, I have known much 
evil. Yet it is still the essential Me, soul of 
my soul, and so must it be through the eterni- 
ties. I can not be separated from that Bright- 
ness, that Innocency, that Hopefulness which 



292 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

once I was — call it back for but an instant to 
give peace to my soul 1 

Vain appeal! — A shadow calling unto the 
Shadow. 



XXVI 

THE GREAT REDEMPTION 

I WAS born in fear, but that was not the 
beginning, for in fear my mother had con- 
ceived me, and during the period before my 
birth, often I felt her heart tremble with fear. 
But even that was not the beginning — oh, far 
from it. I feel within me the fear of remote 
generations, dim, shadowy, formless, vague; 
yet having the power to dominate and oppress 
me. Fearful inheritance, to have to struggle 
with terrors bequeathed by the deadl In 
dreams especially they assert their terrible 
sway over me, filling my brain with a phan- 
tasmagoria of horror, robbing my nights of 
peaceful rest, so that often the morning finds 
me weak, shattered, unrefreshed, and burdened 
with a nameless fear. 

My parents worshipped the One True God, 

the God of Fear, and as a child I was always 

taken to church in order that my mind might 

receive indelible impressions of the faith which 

293 



294 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

held them in terror. There was beauty in the 
church, in the many-hued windows with majes- 
tic aureoled figures, in the sacred statues with 
gold and jewelled crowns, in the marble altar 
with its hovering cloud of angels, and especially 
in the slow illumination thereof, candle by 
candle, until it became a solid blaze of light. 
I loved to see the young acolytes in their 
gowns, some of them as lovely as the marble 
seraphim; to watch the silent, marshalled 
order with which they attended an awe-inspir- 
ing figure clothed in gorgeous vestments; to 
hear at intervals their shrill, sweet young 
voices, rising above the deep note of the organ 
and responding to the priest in words which I 
understood not, but which I thought must be 
the language of Heaven; to smell the strange 
sweet odor of incense, and to see the communi- 
cants in white dresses leave the altar with 
bowed heads and clasped hands, looking like a 
company of the Shining Ones: — all this could 
not but mark a child's mind and soul with an 
abiding remembrance. 

Alas, for me it was spoiled by the terrible 
sermons which the priest so often preached in 
those days, on Hell and the punishment of the 
Damned. There was one priest with a strong, 



THE GREAT REDEMPTION 295 

rolling voice and an appearance of awful sin- 
cerity, who commonly chose this theme and 
whose words I shall never forget. How con- 
vincingly he simulated the anger of his terrible 
God I How movingly he depicted the pains 
and tortures of the Infernal Place ! "Think, 
dear children," he would cry to us, "think but a 
moment on the pains of Hell. Mind cannot 
conceive it; tongue cannot utter it. If you 
touch the tip of your finger to a red-hot coal 
for but an instant, less than a second, what pain 
you suffer ! Less than a second, mark you ! 
Then think of this agony multiplied a thousand 
thousand times, and continued through all 
eternity, forever and ever! The pain never 
to be assuaged, and the punishment never to 
cease!" . . . 

It seemed to me, as I heard him, that Hell 
opened before my eyes, and I saw the very hor- 
rors he portrayed. 

This priest was an honest man; he believed 
to the full extent what he told us ; he was simply 
fulfilling a duty to his God of Fear. The cost 
of raising such awful images before childish 
minds, and filling childish hearts with such en- 
during terrors, was perhaps never considered 
by him; was no part of his priestly business. I 



296 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

should be glad to argue the point with him, 
could I now see him anywhere, save in my 
dreams. . . . 

But fear is not confined to what we call Reli- 
gion or to the worship of a terrible Something 
in the sky; in one shape or another, it dogs life 
at every turn. No man, if he would confess the 
truth, ever lived a whole hour without fear. 
In order to maintain fear in the world, the 
human race has entered into a universal con- 
spiracy which is ironically dubbed, "Civiliza- 
tion". 

Government, taking pattern from Religion, 
is a thing of fear, with a soldier at the base and 
a king at the top! Fear props every throne, 
writes every statute, and gives to every mum- 
mified injustice, the sanction of Law. 

The world awaits its true Saviour — him who 
shall deliver it from fear. In our time, we 
shall not see him, but he is coming, oh yes, 
coming, sure as hope has lived along with fear 
during a myriad years. 

Mankind has once been redeemed, we are 
taught, but alas ! the fruits of that redemption 
are not for this world. Here the shadow and 
the oppression of fear have lifted but a very 
little for some races, and for others, not at all. 



THE GREAT REDEMPTION 297 

What a glorious hope, to bequeath to our chil- 
dren a world without fear? 

It is, alas ! only too true that mankind, in 
their present estate, cannot even imagine A 
Universe without Terror, and, strange to 
say, they would be utterly afraid to think of it. 
But that will become easy for them on the day 
they cast away their worship of the Old God 
OF Fear! 



XXVII 

SURSUM CORDA 

THERE is a brief Latin saying which 
holds in two words, the best philoso- 
phy of the human race. It is, Sursum 
corda — lift up your hearts 1 

Why despair of this world? All the joy you 
have ever known has been here. It is true 
there may be better beyond, but as Thoreau 
said, "One world at a time!" 

And now let us reason a little. Are you sure 
you have given the world a fair trial — or 
rather have you let it give you a fair trial? 
Softly now; the first words will not do to an- 
swer this question — remember it is not I who 
interrogate, but your fate. 

Can you expect anything but failure when 

you lie down and accept defeat in advance? 

Anything but sorrow when you set your house 

for mourning? Anything but rejection when 

you carry dismay in your face, telling all the 

world of your hope forlorn? 
298 



SURSUM CORDA 299 

I went to my friend asking cheerily and con- 
fidently for a thing that seemed hopeless: 
smiling and without a second thought, he gave 
me what I asked. Again I went to my friend 
asking humbly and with little heart of grace 
for a thing that I yet knew was hopeful: 
frowning he denied my prayer. With what 
brow thou askest shalt thou be answered. 

Lift up your hearts ! 

A word in your ear: Have you ever had a 
trouble or a sorrow that would for a moment 
weigh with the sure knowledge that you were 
to die next week, next month, next year? Be 
honest now! . . . 

A little while ago I was very ill, and it 
seemed to me that if only I could get up from 
my bed, nothing ever would trouble me again. 
Well, in time I was able to get up, and then 
the old worries came sneaking back, one after 
another. Even as I write, they are grinning 
and mowing at my elbow, telling me that my 
work is futile. I know I am happy and well 
now, but they are always trying to persuade 
me to the contrary. I know that my hope was 
never so reasoned and strong, the future never 
so gravely alluring; but they will have it that 
I am an utter bankrupt in my hopes and the 



300 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

way onward closed to me. I know my friends 
— my real friends — were never more true and 
fond and faithful than they are to-day — they 
whisper darkly of broken faith, evil suspicion, 
and the treason of the soul. 

Out upon the liars ! It is I that am in fault 
to give them a moment's hearing. The broken 
faith, the treason, the distrust — if any such 
there be — are mine alone ; for in my own breast 
were these serpents hatched, and the poison I 
drink is of my own brewing. 

Lift up your hearts ! 

Hast thou no cause to be happy? — look well 
now. Thou wast sick and thou art now whole. 
Weary, thou didst lay down a beloved task, not 
hoping ever to take it up again; yet see I it is in 
thy hands. Is not the wife of thy youth ever 
with thee, still fair and kind and blooming? 
Thou dreamest a haggard dream of poverty, 
while thy house is filled with the divine riches 
of love and ringing with the joyous mirth of 
thy children. The musicians of hope pipe to 
thee and thou wilt not dance; victory smiles 
on thee anear, and thou wilt think only of 
defeat. Look! — it is but a little way and thou 
droopest with the long wished-for haven in 
sight. . . . 



SURSUM CORDA 301 

Lift up your hearts 1 

Yesterday the aeolian harp was silent all day 
in the window, not a fugitive air wooing it to 
music. To-day it is wild with melody from 
every wind of the world. So shall the brave 
music of thy hopes be renewed. 

Have no care of the silent, barren yester- 
days — they are only good to carry away all 
your mistakes, all your maimed purposes, all 
your vain brooding, all your weak irresolution, 
all your cowardice. Concentrate on To-Day 
and your soul shall be strong to meet To-mor- 
row. Hope, Courage, Energy — and You! — 
against whatever odds. . . . 

Lift up your hearts ! 



XXVIII 

HOPE 

HAST ever been in Hell, dear child of 
God? Hast fallen down — down — 
down to those rayless depths where 
thou couldst no longer feel the supporting hand 
of God, and where thou didst seem to taste the 
agony of the last abandonment? Hast known 
that ultimate remorse wherein the soul ex- 
ecutes judgment on herself — true image it may 
be of the Last Judgment — that night of the 
spirit whence hope and blessedness seem to 
have utterly departed? Hast known all this, 
dear child of God, not once but many times? 
— nay, livest thou in a constant dread expec- 
tation of knowing this again and again, so long 
as thy soul liveth ? Then, be of good hope, for 
thou art indeed a Child of God ! 

There may be many ways of winning Heaven, 
dear heart, but this is of the surest — to know 
and feel Hell In this world. And the more 

terribly thou comest to realize in thy spirit the 
302 



HOPE 303 

horror and desolation of Hell even in this mor- 
tal sojourn, the better approved is thine heir- 
ship in the Kingdom. For when thy feet take 
hold on Hell, then of a truth thy hope is high 
as Heaven! 

This too, forget not, is the trial and test of 
all fine souls — saints of God, martyrs of 
humanity, the great mystics and dreamers, the 
chosen of our race, whose names partake of 
the eternal life and glory of the stars. 
Wouldst thou be of a better company? All 
these great victorious souls had known Hell 
to its uttermost depths, had tasted its most 
bitter anguish, had suffered its most fearful 
agonies, had drunk the cup of its awful de- 
spair, and had cried out under the burthen of 
doom, like Him on the Cross, that their God 
had forsaken them. Yet all were sons of God 
and proved their title by conquering Hell in 
this world. 

Even as they fought the good fight and pre- 
vailed, so shalt thou, brave heart. Be glad 
and rejoice that thou art called upon to endure 
the same great trial, as being worthy of their 
fellowship. Thy deep-dwelling sorrows, thine 
agonies of spirit, — nay, thy wrestling with 
Powers of Darkness and all the supra-mortal 



304 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

venture of thy soul which thou deemest laid 
upon thee as a curse, — do but seal and stamp 
thee God's darling. For none can reach the 
heights who has not known the depths, and 
though the Kingdom of Heaven be not of this 
world, most surely is the Kingdom of 
Hell. . . . 

Courage, dear child of Godl 



XXIX 

IDEAL 

YES, dear, do you go on sending me those 
sweet messages full of praise, and 
hope, and inspiration, holding always 
before me the Ideal, keeping me to the plane 
of my better self. I may not feel that I de- 
serve a tenth part of your faith in me — no 
matter, some day I shall be worthy of your 
praise. And even though I should never reach 
the summit of your appreciation, still the glory 
will be yours of having urged me to the en- 
deavor. You are the height and I am the 
depth; you are the star shining in the Infinite 
and I the poor vainly aspiring worm on the 
earth below : yet in some fortunate hour I may 
be lifted to you. 

For we do not make the supreme effort of 
our souls for the many, but for the few, — nay, 
oftenest of all, for the One ! When I am at 
my best, you know well that I am writing for 
you alone ; when I am at my worst, it is because 
305 



3o6 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

I can not rise to the thought of you. Even 
so my soul Is often silent for days, giving me 
no message from the Infinite, no hint of its 
kinship to the stars, no whisper of the life it 
led before this life and the life it shall lead 
after this. I sometimes think you are my soul! 
But help me — help me always, no matter 
how often and how far I may fall below your 
hope of me. Still reach me your kind hand 
which has power to save me from the last gulf ; 
still say those words of grace and cheer for 
which I hunger the more, the more that I feel 
my unworthiness. I will read them over and 
over until I make myself believe that I really 
deserve them. Some day, be sure, I will utterly 
free myself from my baser self and live only 
for you. I will be your Sir Galahad, and my 
strength of soul shall be as the strength of ten. 
I will dedicate every thought to you and I will 
write for you alone — then must I at last be 
worthy of your praise in which the few or the 
many will have no part. I will no longer give 
out my truth to hire, or shame the Divinity in 
my breast, or care only to move the laughter 
of the crowd. I will write a book only for you, 
and you shall be here, as now, looking over my 
shoulder as I write, and giving me fresh inspi- 



IDEAL 307 

ration whenever my thought fails. Neither 
the few nor the many shall see this book — it 
will be for you and me alone. We shall love 
it greatly for having written it together and 
because it will be forever sacred to us two. I 
have already thought of a title for this book 
— we shall call it the "Story of a Man who 
Lost but afterward Found his Soul". 

Turn now your dear face to the light — for 
my lamp wanes and I have sat far into the 
night — that I may see the look of praise upon 
it that has cheered so many a task of mine; 
that I may renew my worn spirit in the eternal 
peace of those calm eyes. 

Tell me, — oh, tell me the truth, I beseech 
you, — are you my soul! 



XXX 

LITTLE MOTHER 

IN almost every large family there is one 
devoted girl who stands ready to take the 
mother's place and to whom the younger 
ones turn with a sure trust and affection. Of 
all the household virtues — the sacred incom- 
municable things of hearth and home — I know 
of nothing quite so beautiful as this. 

All deep and genuine love is of the essence 
of sacrifice. Who has not suffered the martyr- 
dom of the heart has never known love. But 
how touching is this abnegation, this heroism 
that springs from we know not what depths of 
human nature, when seen in one whose eyes 
still look at you with the candid innocence of 
childhood ! Oh, men and women, tell me not 
that Heaven itself can show a lovelier 
thing. . . . 

And musing on it, there rises before me a 
little face and figure, most dear from all the 

woven ties of race and blood and memory; — a 
308 



LITTLE MOTHER 309 

little face that you might deem plain enough, 
but which is beautiful to me with its quiet brow 
and steady, thoughtful eyes still misted with 
the hopes and dreams of youth. 

She puts a small hand in mine and leads me 
back over the years — ^years of which, God 
knows, I took but little heed in their passage. 
And I see her always the same yet always 
younger, hushing to sleep other little faces 
strangely like hers, mothering one tot after an- 
other, lavishing upon them the artless love and 
praise she should have given her dolls — alas, 
these were the only dolls she ever really knew; 
coaxing them over the first pitfalls of infancy, 
caring for them with a pitiably premature wis- 
dom — aye, and sometimes bravely battling for 
them with the urchins of the street, forgetting 
her tears until the peril was past. 

I see resting his pale cheek on her young 
breast — a child nursing a child ! — one that too 
soon grew weary and left us. But her arms 
are empty only a moment, for even as I look, 
another babe is there. And I wonder, with a 
painful sense of ingratitude, that I should 
never have reckoned this treasure at its worth; 
that I should have been blind to so much that 
was beyond price in the little humble world 



3IO AN ATTIC DREAMER 

about me ; that there was a heavy debt against 
me on behalf of this child which I could never 
repay. 

Something of this I try to say to her in 
stumbling words, nor caring to keep back the 
tears. But she hushes me with a touch on the 
cheek and an intensity of the quiet look habit- 
ual with her. And now she leads me back 
through the long nursery of years; past little 
beds where rosy health slumbered, clasping its 
toys, or pale sickness lay feverishly awake; 
past all the scenes wherein her brave young 
heart was schooled and she became a woman 
whilst yet a child; past the lightly regretted 
dolls and her childish air-castles always 
tumbled topsy-turvy by those tiny baby hands 
— back into the present where, almost a young 
woman now, she smiles joyously at me, holding 
up the youngest in her arms ! . . . 

Oh little mother, blessed be you and all your 
sisters the wide earth over that worthily bear 
the name ! Your tears are reckoned in 
Heaven, where the Innocents sing ever your 
praise; and when you die, having known only 
the maternity of the heart, God calls you unto 
Him, very near the Throne! 



XXXI 

LOVE 

LOVE is for the loving. 
There is but one well in the world 
that grows ever the richer and 
sweeter and more plenteous by giving. 

That well is the human heart and its living 
waters are those of love. 

Yet herein is the wonder of it, that the man 
who thinks he hath need of it but seldom shall 
not at his desire get more than a scanty 
draught, and the sweet water shall turn bitter 
in his mouth. 

Ye have heard it said, to him that hath shall 
be given: this is the meaning thereof. 

Spend yourself in loving that you may be 
often athirst for the life-giving water. But 
count not to drink unto refreshing unless you 
come weary and blessed from the service of 
love. Then, ah then, the sweetness of the 
draught! . . . 

We are constantly seeking our own in dark- 
3" 



312 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

ness and in light, awake or adream; reaching 
out our longing arms toward the Infinite ; send- 
ing forth our filaments of thought; summoning 
the One who shall know and feel, with a pas- 
sion of desire; praying for that rare response 
which crowns the chief expectancy of life. Not 
always do our arms fall empty; not always do 
our thoughts return to mock our vain quest; 
not always are our prayers unanswered and 
our hearts left void and cold. 

I hold this to be of the true divinity of life, 
this kinship of the spirit which will leave no 
man or woman at rest, but ever insists upon 
working out its exigent yet benign destiny; 
forming those sweet and consoling relations 
which are our best joy here and may be our 
eternal satisfaction. 

For the expectancy of love and sympathy — 
that is to say, understanding — is one that never 
dies in the human heart. I may be sad, or dull, 
or cold, or out of touch with reality; I may 
persuade myself that there is no longer any 
pith in my mystery; that the years have left me 
bankrupt in the essential stuff of life; that 
there is no remaining use for me under the sun. 
But let my heart be apprised, in the faintest 
whisper, of the advent or imminence of a new 



LOVE 313 

friend, and lo! the world is fresh-made, the 
heavens constellated with hope and joy and 
wonder as on the first day. 

Life is truly measured only by such love or 
expectancy; when that fails it is the same story 
for king and beggar. 

Love is the summoner, love is the seeker, 
love the expectancy, and love the fulfilment. 
Blessed be Love ! 

I SPOKE some harsh words to my dear love, 
thinking myself in the right and forgetting the 
Law of Kindness. Then as I was turning away 
in anger, the sight of her pale face, with its 
mute reproach, smote me to the heart. I took 
her in my arms and we wept the most precious 
tears together. O divine moment, in that sa- 
cred hush, with her heart beating against mine, 
I seemed to be conscious of angels listening. 

Those who are not in spiritual accord and 
understanding with us — that is to say, who do 
not truly love us — are as if they were not pres- 
ent in our lives, save for the unhappiness of an 
enforced relation with them. Twenty years' 
breathing the same air, living in the same 
house, even going through the physical forms 



314 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

of the closest union, will not change the con- 
dition. At the end of that long period we are, 
by the Law of Spirit, as hopelessly separate, as 
mutually repellent as ever. 

Love is akin to hate — how trite that is and 
how true I I sometimes wonder is either 
quality to be found unmixed with the other? 
Can we have love without hate or hate without 
love? The only glimpse of hatred I have ever 
had that quite appalled me was from one who 
loved me very much. Ah, happy they who 
neither love nor hate ! 

In love we must bleed and the wounds we 
receive are very cruel. Still it seems we can 
never have enough of them, for love has power 
to heal the wounds which it inflicts — and so we 
go on loving and bleeding to the end. 

There is one thing of which I have never 
had my jfill and for which my soul hungers al- 
ways — love I And always I am promising my- 
self that one day I shall be satisfied. 

When I was younger there was nothing for 
me but a woman between the heavens and the 
earth. Now I perceive there are a few other 
things. Yet am I not old, as age is counted. 



LOVE 315 

The only man who has a right to despair of 
the worid is he who neither loves nor is loved. 

There is but one thing more interesting 
than a woman's love — her hate. 

I HATE the woman who is not a mystery to 
herself as well as to me. 

Love is a combat and friendship a duel. 
Strife is the law of existence. 

Love is the primum mobile — the great mo- 
tive which produces the miracles of genius and 
all that we recognize as the work of higher 
powers. Happy the artist whom it blesses and 
fructifies to the end! 

I SHOULD never be weary of learning of 
women. I have long since tired learning of 
men. 

Look back now over the long way and see 
if it be not love that has led you so far I 

Love is the one dream that does not forsake 
us as we descend into the Valley, but is potent 
to bring joy or misery to the last. 

To find the One who could love and feel and 
understand — this is the dream of many who yet 
remain faithful to their bonds. 



3i6 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

What is more terrible than the face of one 
who once loved and now hates you, seen in a 
dream ! 

How great the artist who should know 
woman to the soul, without giving up his free- 
dom to her I 

This earth, what is it but a vast cemetery, 
with the Rose of love and the Immortelle of 
remembrance ! 



HP 



XXXII 

EPIGRAMS AND APHORISMS 

HE wise gods, when they contrived 
■ this tragic comedy of life which we 
have been such a weary time a-play- 
ing, mixed up a little humor with the serious 
business. He alone plays his part well who 
finds the jest — the lath for the sword, the mask 
of Harlequin for the frozen face of Medusa. 
Those who have best solved the exquisite 
humor of the gods are called great by the gen- 
eral voice of mankind, and some dozen of them 
have lived since the world, or the play, began. 
Unlike these supremely gifted players, the vast 
majority of men get only the merest inkling 
of the gods' merry intent, but it suffices to save 
their lives from utter misery. Some devote 
themselves to solving the riddle with terrible 
seriousness, and the laughing god underneath 
always escapes them, leaving them empty- 
handed and ever the more tragically serious. 
These — and they are no small number — die in 
317 



3i8 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

madhouses or religion, or write books which 
increase the sorrow of the world: whatever 
their fate, life remains for them a tragedy to 
the end. 

There came a Soul before the Judgment 
seat. And God said: Need there is none that 
We judge this man, for he hath given all his 
days to Evil; from his childhood he hath turned 
his back upon the City of Peace and none hath 
ever cleaved more to the sweetness of sin. Let 
him pronounce his own judgment and avow 
that he hath deserved the Evil Place. 

Then the Soul cried out: It is true I have 
merited Hell by my iniquity, but this is not Thy 
justice. 

And God said: What more canst thou ask, 
seeing that thou hast wrought judgment against 
thyself ? 

Then the Soul made answer: Send me to 
Heaven for the good I would have done I 

Life Is never simple to the divining spirit — 
every moment of the common day is charged 
with mystery and revelation. 

All the great humorists are sad, — Cer- 
vantes, Moliere, Swift, Sterne, Heine, Richter, 



EPIGRAMS AND APHORISMS 319 

Balzac, Dickens, — for sadness is the penalty 
which Nature has annexed to that deep-search- 
ing knowledge of life we call humor. Hence 
is the tragedy of literature : if the man did not 
weep sometimes, we would cease to laugh at 
his jests; — in the end he weeps too much, and 
then we talk of the failure of his art! 

I KNOW not why I sit under this lamp and 
write these lines — doubtless it has all been writ- 
ten before times out of mind. Could it be pos- 
sible that I should have a single thought that 
never was vouchsafed to another? Or a single 
expression that has not at some time been 
turned by another pen? No, and again. No. 
What then is to do? Why nothing — but to 
write, and to keep on writing! 

It seems to be a fixed belief and an incurable 
superstition of the mediocre mind that great 
mental power is always accompanied by some 
moral handicap or abnormality. Hence the ob- 
scene legends spawned of the vulgar imagina- 
tion, which are attached to so many famous 
and illustrious names. It is the toad's answer 
to the swan — the eternal penalty which medi- 
ocrity exacts of genius. 

Few of a truth are the great artists and 



320 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

poets who have escaped this penalty; nay, we 
are loth to grant them the highest merit should 
they lack the stigma of slander. Glory and 
Golgotha refuse to be separated ! 

Posterity is the hectic dream of the weak 
— it does not break the calm slumber of the 
strong. The man who works with his whole 
soul in the present, who possesses and is pos- 
sessed by the time that has been allotted him 
out of all eternity, — that man may miss the 
prize as well as another. But he is headed the 
right way to capture the award of posterity. 

Shakespeare erred in assigning only seven 
ages to man — there are at least seventy. Often 
we live through several in a single day — it all 
depends upon the kind of experience. 

Why do we write for the world the things 
we would not say to the individual? Why do 
we send on every wandering wind the secrets 
we would not whisper in the ear of our chosen 
friend ? 

Remember that the true struggle of life is 
not to achieve what the world calls success, but 
to hold that Essential Self inviolate which was 
given you to mark your identity from all other 



EPIGRAMS AND APHORISMS 321 

souls. Against this precious possession — this 
Veriest You — all winds blow, all storms rage, 
all malign powers contend. As you hold to 
this or suffer it to be marred or taken from you, 
so shall be your victory or defeat. 

O memory! thou leadest me back over the 
years and showest me many a place where once 
I would have lingered forever, but now thou 
canst not show me one of all where I would 
tarry again ; my Soul knoweth that not a single 
step can be retraced, and that she is of the 
Infinite to be. 

The mystery of the Hereafter is very great 
indeed, but we may take courage in reflecting 
that with each day we leave some of it behind 
us. 

Men are always talking about truth, but 
there is really so little of it in common use that 
it might be classed with radium. Perhaps we 
should not know it if we saw it, for our experi- 
ence deals almost wholly with substitutes. 

In making up the character of God, the old 
theologians failed to mention that He is of an 
infinite cheerfulness. The omission has cost 
the world much tribulation. 



322 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

To preserve the freedom of your mind and 
the whiteness of your soul — that is to lead the 
life ideal. 

Beginning as children, we walk away from 
God, and as old men we strive to totter back 
again. 

Grieve not that you desire always and 
vainly — life without desire is very near unto 
death. 

Nature has no sorrows — perhaps that is 
why she is immortal. 

Not a single religion in the world credits 
God with a sense of humor. Perhaps this only 
proves how great a humorist he is I 

Among persons whose lives touch at every 
point, there is often no communion of the soul 
for months and years. Were we to live only 
by the active life of the soul, our term would 
be as brief as that of the ephemera. 

Men are damned not for what they believe 
but for what they make-believe. 

I AM not the man I was ten years ago. I 
should not know the boy I was were I to meet 



EPIGRAMS AND APHORISMS 323 

him in the street. Time is ever stealing our 
outworn wardrobes of the flesh and spirit. 

The strongest writer smiles at the praise of 
his strength — he alone knows how weak he 
can be. 

The very meanest man I know believes for 
sure that God is made in his particular image 
and likeness. 



XXXIII 

SCRIP FOR YOUR PILGRIMAGE 

CULTIVATE joy in your life and in 
your work. For indeed when you 
think of it, over-seriousness is the bane 
of art as of life. Nothing in art was ever 
done well that was not a joy in its conception. 
Travail the artist must, but in gladness. So of 
the perfect lyrist, we read that his song is a 
rapture poured forth from a heart that can 
never grow old. 

Alexandre Dumas, the greatest master of 
narrative fiction that has ever lived, toiled all 
day and every day, laughing like Gargantua at 
the birth of his son; and sometimes weeping, 
too, over his own pathos. Ah, what would not 
one have given for the privilege of climbing 
the stairs stealthily to watch the merry giant 
at his task! Do you wonder that this rejoic- 
ing faculty furnished for many years the chief 
entertainment of Europe? I should not care 
324 



SCRIP FOR YOUR PILGRIMAGE 325 

much for a writer incapable of being moved as 
Dumas was moved. 

Happy the man who is wise enough to say, 
"Nay, Nay," and sidestep the Sphinx. 

When I come to die, I know my keenest 
regret will be that I suffered myself to be an- 
noyed by a lot of small people and picayune 
worries, wasting God's good time with both. 

Many a man pretending to swallow the ass 
of Balaam of Beor has his way through hfe 
made easy for him. When will Stupidity cease 
to lay cushions for the feet of Hypocrisy? 

The wounds of self bleed always and will 
not be forgiven. 

I NEED not write to my dear friend, for my 
heart talks to him every day over the miles. 
In this way, too, I tell him only the things I 
wish to tell him, and so have nothing to change 
or recall after the letter is sealed and sent. I 
was not always so wise. 

The better is enemy of the good, said Will- 
iam Morris. Do your stint to-day and let it 
go for what it is worth. All days are ranked 
equal in God's fair time. You can not steal 



326 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

from to-day to give unto to-morrow, nor play 
at loaded dice with the Fates. 

To move forward constantly in a straight 
line, without capitulation or compromise, has 
never been granted to any man born of woman. 
The white flags of truce flutter from every 
citadel. 

If your friend were to show you his whole 
mind, you could not breathe the same air with 
him. Never forget that the closest friendship 
is only a truce. 

Show your strength to the world, but be- 
ware how you betray your weakness, even to 
your dearest friend. 

Your purpose — ^your purpose! — never for- 
get that. I read an immense novel of Balzac's 
lately, and the one thing that has remained 
with me from it is this: "Can you go to sleep 
every night with one fixed purpose in mind and 
strengthen in it from day to day?" That is 
the question which every man must put to him- 
self, and as he shall answer it, so shall be his 
success or failure. 

The Talmud says : "There are three whose 
life is no life, — the Sympathetic man, the Iras- 



SCRIP FOR YOUR PILGRIMAGE 327 

cible, and the Melancholy". What chance for 
the unfortunate who is all three In one? 

The most obscure genius has consolations 
that outweigh the blazon of triumphant 
mediocrity. 

If it were not for this haunting distrust of 
self, this recurrent sinking of the heart, how 
easy the task would be ! 

Choose with fear and trembling the hand 
from which you shall accept benefits. 

A MAN may boast that he can judge himself 
as harshly as another, but he makes no mistake 
in passing sentence. 

I AM thankful for your praise and I bow the 
neck to your censure; but I have that within 
which cheers more than the one and chastens 
more than the other. 

There is hardly anything in the world you 
may not have if you can only make people be- 
lieve that you accept them at their own valua- 
tion. 

Do not fear the man who is quick to show 
his anger: — the deadliest antipathies I have 



328 AN ATTIC DREAMER 

ever known were hidden in a smiling eye and a 
cordial hand-clasp. 

The conspiracy of authority, the conspiracy 
of wealth, the conspiracy of superstition and 
ignorance, — these are the forces that rule the 
world. 

Sane persons will not expect to find absolute 
perfection in Heaven — there as here the charm 
of a Httle discontent, the satisfaction of turn- 
ing up a small grievance, will not be denied us. 

The vice of the Pharisee is in believing that 
he is not like unto other men. The virtue of a 
man who knows himself a sinner is in believing 
that other men are not like unto himself. 

That which was lately power is now impo- 
tence, but wait! it will soon be power again. 

It is something to have lived for the things 
of the mind, even though we have missed what 
the world calls wealth or success — those at 
least shall not be taken from us. 

Revise and revise and revise — the best 
thought will still come after the printer has 
snatched away the copy. 



SCRIP FOR YOUR PILGRIMAGE 329 

Balzac laid the world under the greatest 
obligation of any modern man of letters, and 
was driven into an untimely grave by the 
spectre of debt. The highest service is always 
martyrdom. 

A LEARNED young German philosopher, Dr. 
Otto Weininger, pronounced the most acute 
mind since Kant, not long ago solved the great 
problem of sex and then killed himself. What 
else was there for him to do ? 

Every little while it is announced that some 
scientist has pinned down the secret of life, but 
always the learned man has fooled himself. 
God will not be put into a chemical formula. 

Thou art eager to be in company and de- 
lightest in the conversation of thy friends, yet 
thou hast a better friend than any of these who 
constantly solicit thee and whom thou wilt sel- 
dom hear — thy soul I 



XXXIV 

SONG OF THE RAIN 

LONG time I lay in my bed listening to 
the rain. 
In the hushed quiet of night, in the 
solemn darkness, my heart ceased its beatings 
to listen. There was naught in the world but 
my heart and the rain. 

My soul awoke at the song of the rain, 
drenching through the trees, pattering on the 
roof, filling my chamber with coolness and the 
sense of a mystic presence. My soul awoke 
and deemed that it was the pause before the 
End. 

Long I lay still in the darkness, hearing the 
song of the rain ; feeling upon me and through- 
out me the balm and blessing of the rain; tell- 
ing myself that if this were the End, it could 
not better be. My soul was all attention, eager 
to catch the word of its fate, my heart ceased 
its throbbing to listen — there was naught in the 
world but the rain and my heart. 
330 



SONG OF THE RAIN 331 

What was the burden of the song of the 
rain that I heard as I lay still in my bed, wrapt 
in the solemn darkness, feeling as I shall feel 
in the pause before the End? What was the 
burden of the song of the rain which my soul 
awoke to hear and for which my heart stopped 
its beating? 

Peace was the burden of the song of the rain 
that I heard in the deep of night when my soul 
thrilled like a wind-harp in the breath of God. 
Peace was the burden of the song of the rain. 

Now have I put away all strife and anger 
and unrest since there came this wondrous mes- 
sage of the rain, the night and the silence. 
Now do I bear a quiet heart since my soul 
trembled like a wind-harp in the breath of God. 

Peace for all the days that yet are mine 
when often I shall lie awake in the night 
silence, listening to the song of the rain. 

Peace forevermore when my soul shall be 
drawn into the breath of God and my body 
mingled at last with the balm and blessing of 
the rain. 

Peace forevermore! 



UENVOI 

NOTHING Is easier than to win the 
favors of Our Lady of Art. You 
have only to serve her with all your 
heart, and all your soul, and, especially, all 
your time — she is a jealous mistress, as hath 
been said, and slow to forgive the neglect of 
a day or even an hour. You must forego many 
things that make for what the world calls for- 
tune and success. You shall woo the shadow 
for your portion and leave to others the sub- 
stance. And ever you shall toil with unwearied 
labor, while Age steals upon you and the gay 
procession of Youth passes by in mockery. The 
whitening hair, the flagging pulse, the stiffen- 
ing limb, the broken slumber, the lamentable 
awakening — these things shall not trouble your 
perfect faith, for they are dear to Our Lady. 
It is not enough that you be patient — you must 
become patience itself, though each returning 
sun bring you the same tale of futflity and dis- 
appointment. This shall sustain you, that 
332 



L'ENVOI 333 

though Our Lady give no sign — not a flutter 
of the eyehds, not the hint of a smile at the 
corners of the mouth — still she sees and ap- 
praises your devotion. More than this you 
shall not ask if you be of the true elect. Yes, 
one thing more . . . just before you die she 
may give you her hand to kiss ! 

And this is all? No: some years after you 
are silent, with your hope and your despair, a 
little honor may be paid the dead man that was 
ever denied the living; and a few people may 
carelessly turn the pages of the Book for which 
in very truth you lived and died. 

AD MAJORAM DEI GLORIAM 



